Morty continued to flee, and ran through the outskirts of town, through the fields and up in to the hills. As the land grew studded with trees, and the rumbles faded, Morty took his opportunity and leaned against a tree to catch his breath.

He turned back and faced the town, from up in the hills he could see the erratic swath of destruction mega-Beckham had carved through Courage Falls. The few tall buildings, the apartments and offices that were tax shelters for those big city corporate types, were in ruin. The residential sector, having been built either from cinder blocks or dung thatch, were characteristically ablaze. The dung heaps that were near the explosion had burned like molten heaps of cow dung, which is what they were. The cinder block buildings bled black from their windowsills licked with fire, but they stayed standing.

Beckham stomped in circles, breathing bullets and using his ultra-X-ray power to cause ultra-cancer to the unwitting victims in his path.

Morty breathed in, coarse nostril hairs flaring. The destruction was beyond his comprehension. The shakeup had pulled him to full acuity and he was sure that he was seeing reality, he was just at a loss as to what to do.

As Morty sat, alone, gasping for breath in the wake of the destruction, he felt a pressure behind him and something wrapping around him, grasping him, the tendrils coarse as trees with trunks 2.4 meters wide.

He looked down and saw a gigantic decaying clawed hand gripping him. His feet left the ground and he went tense with fear.

After an extraordinarily long blink, he opened his eyes and found himself staring into the giant maw of the werewolf zombie. He was even larger now than when Morty had run afoul of him as a child. It appeared as thought he were at least seventeen point 9 feet tall, drooling spectral mucus and snarling a low growl through his perforated zombie neck.

“We meet again, Mortimer, and you have debts to pay.”

Morty could not remember much of his childhood or even his life before the seizures started.

“And here we are, you got what you wanted, and you got it from us. Now it is time for you to repay your debt.”

Morty stood there, paralyzed, not even thinking about struggling or escaping. The sudden surreality of the situation had overwhelmed him, and being gripped by a 2-story tall werewolf zombie is usually enough to make anyone question their sanity. At least quietly.

“The awakening of mega-Beckham is only the beginning, the first step in the final apocalypse of humanity. The underworld has been stewing. You puny humans have always been wrong, you spent thousands of years deifying nothing. Your political and religious leaders, your kings and peasants spend their lives pining for a supreme good, they were convinced of it because it was the only sane answer to the evils of the world.

“You people constructed this reality and refused to look at what was going on around you, they never noticed the lizards and trolls, they never noticed the vermin that lived in their alleys, the worlds that lived on the waste and recklessness of the affluent.

“And through those swings, they still believed something must counter the continuously growing forces of evil.

“And you, all of you humans were wrong. There is not a single evil, there is not a supreme evil, there is simply the parasitic existence of people other than the homogeneous lumps you have categorized into.

“And now it is unraveling. It is no coincidence that the conditions to create mega-Beckham happened over your fair town. Long has there been a dichotomy in these town walls between the nice facade the townsfolk try to live in and the activities that go on throughout the alleys and the surrounding areas.

“The caustic byproducts from the underground base, the throngs of artificial rats, the society of the homeless, and those willing to be crazy for their own theories. All of these have congregated in your town, along with the hypnotized drones you dragged out here. You had been touched, you have seen the visions, you know what shepherds your contemptible breed.

“And you have been given ample opportunity throughout your life, you have been given dumb luck and extraordinary abilities, these things that you squandered, neither helping those that gave you power, or helping those for your own common good. You lone moral sense has been twisted into abominable selfishness.

“This day has been destined for thousands of years, we are all but pawns, but most of us have been at least willing.”

Out in the distance, you could hear a lone wolf call, which set off a flurry of echoes in the distance. They kept reverberating, and Morty could tell that they were drawing nearer.

“You hear that, Mortimer? My kind is drawing nearer, we will gather here, before the rift and work to achieve the power that has been denied us since the curse. And you, Morty will aid us.”

Morty regained composure and took a deep breath. With one fluid motion, he reared his head back and smashed his indestructible face into the werewolfs clenched teeth.

He missed, though, and hit the zombie werewolf on the nose. Gigantic werewolf zombie nose is nothing pleasant, mind you, but it seemed to make an impression. The zombie dropped him and grasped his snout with a yelp. Whiny little bitch.

Morty fell to the ground and ran off into the woods. He could hear the howling getting louder around him and he looked over his shoulder as he scurried, he could see the great wolf recover and let a low guttural roar. He fell to his knees and crawled out of the bushes into the corn fields.

In the distance, he could see the glow of the ruining city, and behind them a rapidly growing collective of zombie werewolves. Twilight had faded into night time, and the moon was full and hung brightly in the sky, the glowing of the town providing an orange outline to the stalks of corn surrounding him.

Disoriented and completely lost, Morty was once again dragging himself through unfamiliar territory and feeling physically deficient. He would occasionally stop, lying low, trying to gauge his distance from the exploding calamities, and would carry forward. After about 20 minutes of this, he accidentally put his hand into a family of weasels, all hiding in the corn. The weasels were shaking with fright and immediately dispersed, but not without giving a few bites to Morty’s shoulders. The pain was not crippling, but certainly more than he wanted to deal with.

He made a mental note to check more closely for weasels as he crawled through the corn. The great zombie werewolf had apparently not given immediate chase, and he could hear him roaring back where he was first accosted. The outlying howls seemed to be congregating.

Morty decided to make a break for it. He pulled himself to his feet and broke in as much of a run as he could muster. From the outlying corn fields, he could see a church off in the distance. And made his way there, keeping a watchful eye on the still rampaging mega-Beckham in the distance.

And no for some unspectacular, end-of-book filler:

Hi folks, its me, Vaclav. I often play an illiterate foreign character of the same name. Oh, sure, I regale you with tales of my antics, drinking, fighting goats. I give you recipes, that involve pastiche flower and boiled shrimp. Most of those I just slap together in order to keep myself from the roving insanity. Yes, this truly has nothing to do with the rest of the book, but is easier than trying to shoehorn a plot of all the incoherent gibberish that has made up this book so far. Now here is the problem. I, Vaclav have now created an identity of incoherence, but in order to keep doing it, which is my bread and motherfucking butter, I must refine and add a new level of sophistication to the character of a simpleton. Strange, huh? So how does one go about that? This is a classic problem because there is no point in to trying to give depth to something that is one dimensional by design. However, if you can continue to produce the same thing at the same quality, it will become noticeably diluted. Should we then just carry on lack every other mediocre hack and just retread the same jokes, the same ideas. There is no real innovation, just a modification and synthesis of new ideas. So, I Vaclav, can continue my public life of unsophistication, or act as myself, which is so unremarkable that I had better luck as a simpleton. Right? So where does that leave Vaclav? Vaclav has identity crisis! Vaclav need goat milk! Vaclav tell now favorite Larmen recipe: Take Turkey blood, gravey vessel and burn to crisp, serve with lye! See? Its just the same old shit, but not quite as funny, the retreading of these ideas just make it seem more and more half-assed. So here I am, writing through a phony character in the last few pages just to space it out because I can’t even bullshit through the plot. well, not at full typing speed at least. So where does this leave Vaclav? Irrelevant, mostly.

How’d that go?

Morty made his way out of the field in to the back lot of the church, he could hear seas of incoherent muttering beyond the fence and the aimless shuffling of feet. He could feel the fear and discontent even though he couldnt see any of the faces. He crossed the neightboring lot and made his way to the front of the church.

Pushing open the door, he saw the pews filled with transients, many he recognized from walking through the streets and guiding the homeless. There were few of the clergy available to help. The tension was high for many, but the church population were largely the truly insane or helpless. The only one who could sit through the preachy bullshit and managed to follow the rules. At least during the daytime.

He pushed his way through the sea of hands, instinctively reaching out to the man in the suit. He made his way to the altar and called out.

“People of Courage Falls! Please listen!”

He was ignored, a lone scruffy wino stared up from the audience, his lips were moving like he was shrieking, but no sound was coming out.

Morty sighed in frustration. He could tell mega-Beckham would come for them sooner or later, and that there was a flock of 20 foot werewolf zombies who seemed to think he owed them something.

“What could possibly happen now?” he thought.

Outside, mega-Beckham was still in roid-rage mode. He was scattering his X-rays and stomping out anything that he could see. Mostly weasels. Courage Falls has lots of weasels for some reason. Not like the huge flocks of neurel net connected animatronic hive mind rats, that was something else.

mega-Beckham was completely unaware of anything other than what was in front of his foot, and what else would make for a good futbol stomp. His rage of energy had burned away his athletic gear, and he was once again clothed in the decaying skins of thousands of eyeless merchants and helpless woodland animals that had been aging through the centuries.

His power grew unabated, bullet breath turned to fire vision and his steps caused earth quakes. He focused his vision on the river and it boiled with toxic acid. His high pitched scream shattered windows beyond the earthquakes. He was truly destroying cities.

He stopped, roared and jumped up into the sky where he was no longer visible.

Morty watched all this out of the back of the shattered stained glass windows that had once lined the church. He saw that it was his chance to break, and he tuned in to his most focused hypnotic glare and pointed his gaze direectly at the mute screaming man. He got his gaze and the man reached his arms out. He pulled two other nearby stragglers and turned their eyes toward Morty, they in turn reached out, and a wave of silence grew over the swelling seas of hypnotized bums.

Morty stepped down from the alter, and the path cleared before them. He walked silently through the path to the main entrance, kicked the doors open, and beckoned the people to follow him. They marched quietly, shuffling their feet, never breaking their gaze from the new found leader.

Out the door and back on the street, Morty broke in to a run, and the tribe followed behind him. He was trying to get them out of town, away from mega-Beckhams targets, away from any other danger, except the weasels.

As they ran, the ambient light grew, behind them there was an violent orange glow, that chased the moon light, a loud thundering sonic boom shook the air. Morty turned back and gasped in horror, mega-Beckham came tearing down through the atmosphere, completely engulfed in flame. He landed and sent a large shockwave and fireball around him, turning the old down town into cinders and cracking the earth diagonally across Courage Falls neatly planned “lots of squares” town design.

Steam poured from the fissures and the fires spread immediately. The fissure was visible from a distance, and small spigots of lava began to spray. Morty signaled to the rest of the tribe to follow him and they kept running, back trying to distance themselves from the birth of the apocalypse.

The tribe ran back into the surrounding countryside and up into the foot hills. mega-Beckham seemed to have taken a break from the destruction to just wail endlessly. As he shrieked, a pillar of fire grew from him and evaporated any clouds. The stars began to disappear, and even though it was night, the surrounding fires had turned the area as light as day.

As they made it into the foothills, they found a small clearing of rocks that fed in to a shallow cave. Together, they huddled in whatever shade they could find. Morty stood alone on one of the higher rocks and watched the pillar of flame rise. It looked as thought it was licking and scarring the atmosphere. Black plumes of smoke worked downward and the heat began to rise.

The fissure spread, and more of the ground began to break away. Morty watched it spread until the crumbling appeared to have unearthed and underground structure. It had been broken open in the chaos and he could see a few people in lab coats climbing out and running away from all the destruction.

As the crumbling continued, it unearthed a large passageway, reinforced with steel. An automated plank came out of the passage and raised it up to the ground level. After a long delay, Morty saw some unusual types of vehicles emerging.

Tanks.

The military installation had finally been uncovered, and even had a contingency for the use of getting their experimental vehicles out around the town in the case of an emergency lockdown. This plan seemed appropriate, given the circumstances, and a small batallion of tanks was soon on the far side of town, skirting around the fissure and trying not to catch mega-Beckahms attention as he scorched the sky. As they moved in to position, 3 military helicopters came out, keeping their distance, and floating behind mega-Beckham.

Morty wanted a piece of the action. He turned and silently hypnotized the church folk and bums to stay in place, he was going to go look for more and see if he could get anyone else out of the town. He said this of course, without even talking. Because he was really good at hypnosis.

As he made it back in to town, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror. In the flaming light, he suit looked fancier than normal. And then he realized he was famished. He looked in through a shattered window at one of the not completely ruined homes and saw an easily available jar of carrots and oil. He paused, wondering if it was right to steal food in a disaster.

The burning fires had left pillows of ash floating through the town which fell to earth almost tranquilly. And then, Morty saw something else float down in front of him. It looked almost like a snowflake. He pulled his eyes off of the delicious jar of carrots and oil and looked around. The single flakes were outnumbering the ash.

In the middle of the fire and destruction, it had some how begun to snow. A gentle breeze blew by and a flake landed on Morty’s lip. He licked it off and it dissolved, leavng a taste of chemicals behind.

“Why, this isnt snow at all … whats going on?”

Even though it wasnt snow, it was having a chilling effect on the lava geysers and the flow slowed. The snow fell thicker and began to stick to the ground. The sheer volume was astonishing. A slight wind grew stronger and blew the snow into a single pile.

Morty sat there for a few minutes, just watching the swirling patterns, he himself enraptured in the supernatural patterns building the huge pile ahead of him. From the sky above the rapily growing mountain, a lone figure, human sized lowered from the sky, apparently held by nothing. It levitated down slowly, unmoved by the swirling gales that had been emerging. He touched down lightly on top of the mountain.

The figure cried: “BECKHAM! You are threatening industry, you are threatening our way of life, we are the ones who accepted you, gave you what you want, and now you try to bring the end of the world. This apocalypse will consume you, too Beckham, you will not see the end of this day!”

Strider war child reeled back and gathered his power, the winds shifted and the swirling snow gathered into a large boulder, it spun in an orbit around him and sling shot around to be launched directly at Beckhams head.

Once it left the safety of the carefully manipulated winds, the giant ball of cocaine caught on fire and flew potently towards the target, as it neared the fire changed from orange to blue and looked to be frozen in place. The ball smashed across mega-Beckham’s face and disrupted the giant fire pillar.

The tanks, now in a protected formation took this as an opprotunity to blast away. Beckhams initial confused belch was quickly offset by several sharp yelps as explosions rocked across his aged traveler pelts.

Even the best of the puny humans weapons had little effect except to make mega-Beckham really really pissed off. He clenched his fists and slammed against the ground. The tanks shook in place, but had been well fortified against this, they were experimental tanks after all. The helicopters took the initiative to fly to the back of his head and launch some more missles. This seriouslly was just gonna piss of Beckham. He was immortal, remember?

Strider war child barely stirred, he stayed fleet foot on top of his mountain of cocaine. He fluttered along, making a cocaine walkway through the air that supported him.

Morty pushed his way into the apartment, and grabbed the jar of carrots. He pulled it to his face and dumped the jar straight into his mouth, swallowing the carrots whole. Its easier to do that when they are packed in olives. They were baby carrots too, not some gargantuan root. He was a Minnesotan, not a sword swallower. He made his way back out to the street and headed into the alley, trying to stay out of view of Strider war child and cautious of anything that might be a werewolf. As he ran, he stumbled across more homeless people, or townsfolk confused but not killed in the chaos. He refined his hypnosis to give directions, and as he stared at each person, he could refer them to the enclave on the outside of town.

“Im pretty sure its the end of the world” Morty said to himself.

As he weaved through town, he had to find new routes, and to stay away from the lava that was still encroaching despite the lava cooling flaming cocaine that was falling from the skies in harmony with the ash from the burning buildings.

The further he went into town and followed the fissure, the closer he came to beckham. Strider war childs onslaughts had cooled much of the fire around there, so all that was to watch for was the lumbering giants stomping, and the shrapnel from the unyielding attacks by the military vehicles.

As he drew nearer to the massive feet, he could see black figures crawling up across his shoes and ankles. The zombie werewolves had apparently seen the lack of fire as the opportunity to attack the giant. And were making their way up the lattice of pelts snarling furiously and swiping at mega-Beckhams immortal flesh.

Strider war child strode along his cocaine bridge and approached Beckhams midriff. As he strode, he flung huge rocks of chilling cocaine at anything that moved, especially mega-Beckham.

One of the werewolves clambered up and lunged off of the pelts and at strider war child. Strider war child deftly stepped aside, but the werewolf clung to the lingering cocaine bridge, and swiped at Strider war child’s feet, catching a claw on one of his boots. Strider war child dissolved the bridge and began a fearless free fall. The werewolf latched on to the rest of the boots, and caught a pelt on the way down. So the two of them were locked in a mortal struggle, hanging off of the clothing of pelts.

With his concentration broken, the gale winds and endless snow of cocaine quietly ceased. Morty continued to the base of the shoe. Careful to stay under cover, and out of sight.

“What the hell am I doing here?” Morty thought to himself. “I was just trying to help the local economy. Just trying to do right. Now, here I am at the bridge of the apocalypse, looking at a spectral man-bitch from hell, covered in zombie werewolves, one of them attacking a patron of industry with a masterful control of cocaine, all the while being attacked by experimental military vehicles while a flock of insane homeless people are huddled in fear and hypnosis by me.

“Now, what am I supposed to do?”

In his moment of self doubt, he huddled down to the ground, and began to pull himself under a collapsed building. He reached in hand first and felt a handful of fur and some sharp teeth.

The rat bit his hand and squealed, it ran through the crack and lunged right at his indestructible face. It latched on to his nose, and would not let go. Morty grabbed the rat firmly and pulled it straight back. He would have been fucked if his face were destructable like a normal persons.

He looked the rat straight in the eye, and it went passive, almost limp. It held his gaze, and seemed to be waiting. Morty recognized the telltale signs of hypnosis.

“But thats impossible,” rodents aren’t smart enough to have the power of suggestion. He looked beyond his gaze and into the recesses of the space he had been crawling into. He saw several pairs of eyes twinkling in the dark. Passively watching with the same expession as the one in his hand.

Morty narrowed his eyes and stared at the rat. The hive mind was on full alert, and had developed enough sophistication to be susceptible to suggestion, and Morty was a master of suggestion. Clutching the rat, he stared in its eyes and called to the other rats. The twinkling eyes grew nearer, and one by one, the rats in the shadows emerged. He looked around and could see the swarms that had been flooding and scattering begin to well up in the street again. The first comers formed a small circle around him, and it quickly filled in, never breaking the bonds. They piled on top of each other and formed a living cone around him. All the while, Morty stood motionless, with the control rat in his hand. Morty was now protected by a heavy wall of synthetic rats. He made a quick retreat, and the rats shifted their ever changing structure to follow his steps. He dropped the control rat, and kept focused on the wall in front of them. He managed to work a small openeing so he could see in front of him, crossed the street and found shelter in a small collapsed hovel, just out of the range of mega-Beckhams feet.

Staring at the rats, he pleaded that they all gather around him. The hive mind tightened its grip and began to pull the hordes around. A small group of rats gathereed around his feet and wedged themselves under his shoe, evenly distributing the weight. They began to run in the direction Morty was looking, and Morty lost his balance. He fell backward, and was caught and supported by several layers of rats. The handful that had been under his feet had quadrupled in number and he was no longer on the ground. The swelling pack of rats was lifting him up, and he soon found himself back on his feet, coasting on a surf of writhing rats. They were moving quickly as a group, all running at top speed to keep up with each other, they pulled Morty toward beckham, and he coasted as if standing on a sloped sheet of ice, directly toward the feet. He was 24.8 feet in the air now, just over the tops of backhams shoes, and the rats had built an elliptical base around beckham that was rising in a waving column, pushing Morty higher and higheras he spun around mega-Beckham.

Having realized that the military vehivles were no threat, beckham returned to his earlier pose and ignored the surrounding forces and began scorching the atmosphere, screaming in his high pitched troll roar.

The rat wall had reached his midriff, with Morty still coasting on the top. Some of the zombie werewolves lept off the midriff and on to the rat wall, trying to catch the wave as it came across. It proved far more difficult than clinging to the pelts so they quickly returned.

Finlly, the writhing rat wall, completely surrounding the squatting mega-Beckham, reached his eyes. They forced out an alcove, and Morty came face to face with the spectral man bitch of hell.

“You!” said Morty. “It was you that did it to me, you broke my mind down, you made my mind go bad. And now you are here, destroying my town, trying to bring on the end of the world!”

mega-Beckham opened his eyes, and Morty, for the first time, did not have a seizure when seeing his face. mega-Beckham smiled a stupid looking euro trash smile, and blew on Morty. The blast knocked him directly backward and Morty fell toward the ground.

The hive mind had anticipated such an accident, but to be resiliant had calculated the lowest energy way to monitor and react, a single spindle of rats shot out, all running across each other, but they missed, they did not account for the weight of Morty’s indestructible face and could not manage it properly.

And as he fell to the ground, Morty had flashbacks, he saw every bad dream, every drunken night, every lost memory. Everything that he had willingly or unwillingly forgotten came back to him, he was drowning in the guild of his unkept responsibilities when a gloved hand caught the collar of his fancy suit.

“Well, that was a classic boner you almost pulled.” said Strider war child, dusting Morty with cocaine. Looks like you need a pick me up, maybe some of your rat friends too…”

Strider war child pointed at the wall and a fine layer of dust blew across the burgeoning rat wall. He noticed a marked increase in activity. Morty also felt great for some reason, and most of his pain seemed to have gone away.

“Who are you, again?” Morty asked.

“Silly human, Im Strider war child, and this is my mountain of cocaine. I represent industry.”

Morty reagained his composure, thanked Strider war child politely and jumped back across to the rat wall. It moved and accomdated him and worked him back to the top of the wave. This time, they kept him as a moving target in front of mega-Beckham.

Morty struggled just to keep his balance, the robot cocaine rats were moving him around unstably, and he watched as the great zombie werewolf led the pack in climbing up the giant English troll. He came up across the shoulder and ran around to the back of his head. The rat wall had locked out the tank firings, and the helicopters and long since run out of ammunition and landed to refuel with experimental helicopter fuel.

The great wolf crawled up across mega-Beckhams scalp, clawing and stabbing all the way, making a ferocious show of the matter, Beckhams flame pillar was wavering with the now constant distractions and the zombie werewolfs efforts were noticeably disturbing him.

Meanwhile, Strider war child was throwing deadly balls of cocaine directly at the wolfs head, but to no avail. Beckham always closed his eyes, or managed to blow them away with a gust of wind.

“Its his eyes,” screamed the champion of industry, Strider war child , “keep his eyes open!”

The great wolf slid down mega-Beckhams forehead and caught his claws on the bridge of his nose. Beckham tried flailing his arms, but routinely came up against the wall of rats that were completely constricting him.

The great wolf reached over and pried open mega-Beckhams eyes. At the same time, Strider war child threw a massive boulder of cocaine directly into them. Morty shuddered in disappointment as it crumbled harmlessly against his immortal eyes.

“Morty!” screamed the great wolf, “use your face!”

Strider war child reared his head and gathered a Morty sized ball of cocaine. Suddnely, the wave of rats buckled, throwing Morty far inito the air.

Strider war child wound up and pitched the ball into Morty, who found himself wedged in it, indestructible face first flinging towards mega-Beckham.

The werewolf pulled the eye wide, and buckled back as Morty’s face shatted through mega-Beckhams mega-Cornea.

Morty was covered in cocaine, buried deep in the eyeball fluid of mega-Beckhams right eye. He squirmed and pushed and pulled himself out, as he moved, a continuous stream of cocaine took his displacement.

The great wolf palmed Morty and leaped off mega-Beckham into the wall of rats, which carried them off strictly after the storm.

Strider war child followed running along his floating cocaine bridge. When they had gotten far enough, they turned around and watched mega-Beckham shreiking. The wound in his eye had begun to drain out the rest of his body. He was falling, streams of blood erupted from his skin and his wikid body burned in fire of the torment of the thousands he had butchereed over the years. He stumbled forward, blinded and flailing, and fell directly into the fissure, screaming, never to be seen again.

Strider war child sealed off the fissure with his waning coke stash, then joined the group of sentient rats, homeless people, and zombie werewolves.

“Well, the important thing is that we all worked together.” Morty said.

Beckham had come far over the centuries. He had managed to work through societies and live between different cultures. He slowly learned the temperance he had been born lacking, and in the beginning of the second Millennium, he had decided to re-enter public life, after laying low after murdering a shoe manufacturer and blaming two Italian-American anarchists in the early 1900s, and then killing an American president with his bullet breath a few decades later.

He had become a master of silent propaganda and orchestration of the human drama, but his euro-trash troll brain had prevented him from ever actually learning the language. He had re-emerged as an unnaturally gifted athlete, though managed to make nothing about his childhood known. It was because he didnt have one, and was born of the blood of a thousand orphans in a satanic ritual, in case you didnt read that part earlier. I don’t blame you, I actually dont remember writing it, but I think its in there.

After an unnatural rise in popularity, some dipshit executive somewhere thought it would be a good idea to bring the inventor of futbol and celebrity to America and pay him a bunch of money for it. He came over and immediately began to advertise the way he had in countries that couldn’t understand his limited grasp of English, and carried the same confidence about the gibberish that he puked out of his mouth.

But the season had not gone well, and the new audience had trouble understanding what he was saying, or why he was advertising products that had absolutely nothing to do with him or the roots of his perceived celebrity. Its not that these people were smart, they just couldnt tell what the fuck he was talking about most of the time.

So in the face of this audience, he grew silent. The tabloids wrote endlessly, and he granted no interviews, his private life was a mystery and the speculation spun endlessly.

His self-imposed limitations and lack of understanding had led to a lackluster season, and his own vow of silence had allowed a quiet rage to build.

Then, on that fateful day, he was riding coach, mobbed by the plebeians, on his way to New York to visit his euro trash wife, who was actually a hybrid lizard overlord / monitor lizard (they were star crossed lovers, thats another book in itself), he tried to get a bucket of gruel from his personal airline attendant, unfortunately, his usual gruel dealing attendent had the day off and it was an intern from his PR department. He brought him a flask of mead instead and Beckham seriously flipped his shit.

Beckham had lived through plagues, fires, sandstorms, and droughts. He had overseen the slaughter of infants, fires that destroyed towns. He had taken his part in banditry along trade routes that cut the lifeblood of towns and caused mass starvation. He had slaughtered thousands of animals and made intricate tapestries of their innards.

This was a demon who spent his youth in bloodlust and drinking eyeball fluid on a whim. He was not of the rest of the world and his great power and immortality had left him imbalanced and petty.

He had endured the drama of people for centuries. He had seen them kill each other and live in misery. He had also spent a lot of time killing them and making sure they lived in misery.

But he really did not fucking like mead.

The rage of misunderstanding and the pressure of living in a new media centric culture that had not evolved through the centuries with his presence had taken a toll, and the layers of false sophistication that had built up peeled away in an instant.

Beckhams rage exploded, as did his size, his frame tore the plane to pieces, tossing the helpless passengers to the ground in an ironic mercy, sparing them from the coming armageddon. He spun, hovering, ever expanding to monstrous proportions, and then hurled furiously to the ground, landing, crouched in a cornfield.

The impact spread in a furious burst of energy, the husks seared, and then burst in flame. mega-Beckham stood and strode towards the nearest lights.

Morty saw a rat dart out from an alley into the sidewalk. It looked around quickly and ran in a zig-zag avoiding hydrants, trees and people. A few seconds later two more rats came running out, and looked around panicked, they headed passed Morty and off, away from the sunset. Two became five, and five became a trickle, the trickle became a flood, and soon there were hordes of rats spilling from the alleys, with the occasional weasel mixed in for good measure. They clogged the streets and traffic came to a standstill, the homeless had scattered, and Morty found himself standing alone on a sidewalk teeming with stotes and rodents.

He stood there paralyzed, he had so distanced himself from the world, and advertising that he had not had a traumatic episode in recent memory. He could not tell if what was happening was really there.

And then he felt a rumble across the soles of his shoes. It was hard to distinguish from the piles of rats running around his feet, but it grew stronger. His ankles shook, and then he felt his whole body shaking with the vibrations. He finally snapped back let his instinct take over, he ran off the sidewalk, away from the rats, away from the growing vibrations. He didnt look back until he was on the outskirts of the city.

The sun had set it and it was twilight, in the distance, he could see fires and a colossal hulking figure kicking at buildings. It was wearing some kind of colossal athletic uniform.

Morty walked confidently from the podium when the crowd had left. He had a small pile of index cards with his speech that he had put in his pocket.

Hypnosis had served him well, he had seen in his visions the power that comes with being able to influence and manipulate humans. He had seen the undercurrent of evil in the world throughout the ages, and learned to be unsuggestable.

Morty’s saving grace, perhaps, was his insistence on doing right, however, his brains malleability and his episodes of seizures when faced with pure evil had left his brain scrambled in a convoluted series of rationalizations that had justified the use of his powers to sell books. Morty really didnt know much about real estate, except that he could hypnotize people and buy and sell properties for exhorbitant profits. He really wasnt much of a writer, either. Most of his “book” was just filler that he had written over the course of a very drunken month while trying to sort out his seizures and hallucinations.

The book was mostly a set of top 10 lists full of common sense, and a few anecdotes of fictional characters. His whole rationale was to make money, but he learned quickly not to bankrupt his subjects, and kept a small enough clientele that he had been able to afford modest dividends in his shady transactions.

In doing this, he managed to keep a low profile, but still keep accruing revenue. Each transaction that involved a party brought a new member into his fold. He kept them hypnotized only in the sense that they would never consider an avenue of self-help or real estate without consulting him, and he returned enough of a margin that no one ever questioned him.

So he had done right, by his standards. He had a large picture of jesus in the window, for reasons that he could not remember, but he thought was right. Morty was not a religious man, and tended to blaspheme and profane extensively when not in public. He never had a spiritual thought, slammed the door on missionaries on the weekends, and once puked blood in the image of satan.

Really, it was for the window.

Aside from that, he had mostly capitalized the profits independently of his personal income, and kept his own pay substantially higher than his old string of jobs, but only to make a living wage. That afforded an apartment with a larger window to accommodate his picture of Jesus.

He had come to have a grudging acceptance of Alouicious, but never named him, he communicated with whistles, as Morty loved a whistlin’. Thats why I named him Alouicious, its a pretty fucking rad name, if you think about it. He had accepted him as an unorthodox and misunderstood protector. He tried a few times to call him inside from the cold, but the dog just stayed, watching patiently until he closed the door and then made his rounds.

And after all that, he was still in Courage Falls, Minnesota. His real estate dealings alone had brought a few dozen people into the town, and it had progress nicely, but the after hours was still dark. The increase in growth had proportionally increased the amount of vagrants, transients, homeless kids, crackheads, and everything else. Surprisingly, the crime rate stayed low. The alleys were still filthy, and vermin were always heard scurrying about just out of view.

And that is the town that Morty walked out to, on a brisk spring evening. His staff cleaned up behind him and he made his way down the familiar streets. The sun was just setting and the streets were filled with late commuters, and the seasonal bums.

Occasionally, one of his self help real estate hypnosis slaves would pass in a car, with a friendly honk.

He gave a friendly whistle, and heard a low growl from the shadows. Alouicious preferred to stay unseen. Especially when the sun was out.

Morty considered it his civic duty to keep the tribes of the insane from ruining the nice main street, so he would approach them, quickly hypnotize them (crackheads and lunatics are surprisingly open to suggestion), and implore them to seek shelter at one of the many churches. So, as he walked through the small clusters and individuals scattered along the way, they would quickly scurry off to the back streets and in to the missions.

And so it was, this day like any other, Morty tread the same paths he had, quietly exercising his skills, cleaning up the community for the nice people, and accepting the unyielding, brutal love of an angry, mangy dog.

“Hello, my name is Morty Sharp. My hobbies are masturbating in public, and kicking dogs.”

“Hi, Morty!”

“All my life, all I ever wanted to be was a degenerate. Its amazing how sometimes life’s plans can work out for you. If you aim low enough.”

Like in his dreams, the crowd began to chant rhythmically, and he stood there, arms outstretched peering his well honed hypnotic gaze on the crowd.

“And just like I can make you people pay to hear me say these things, just as I can sell you a house, just like you will buy my audio book series: ‘Hyp-gnosis, the ultimate book to self-help and real-estate mastery through hypnotic suggestion, by me, Morty Sharp!’

The crowd burst into a ruckus, cheering, whistling and stomping their feet. All the while chanting his name.

He lowered his palms, and dimmed his gaze. The crowd grew silent.

“I wasn’t always the Morty Sharp you know now. There were times when I would dream of being here. In fact, I got the whole idea in a dream.

“I spent my whole life aimless and broke. I was angry, and lonely. I lived in a tiny apartment that was built around a bathroom that was constantly sprayed in bleach. It had one window that I used to fall through. I had one fancy suit that I could only afford to wash every two weeks. I learned later one of the reasons I was so alone is because I needed more suits.

“I lived every day in a daze, doing nothing, thinking nothing, just believing what was on TV, and I know now that that is no way to live my life. I knew I had to do right, I knew I had to make a mark. I knew I had to try.

“But trying never got me anywhere, I tried to be everything they said, I tried to do what they told me I should do. And that got me nowhere.

“And at long last, I felt myself break down. I didnt know what was happening, but I was quickly sliding from bad to worse. I found myself with personal problems, I was suddenly drinking to hide from my problems. I had stray dogs stalking me.

“I needed to do right. I needed money to do right, and whats more, I needed help.

“I began to reach out, and found, when you need help, it is there. It always seemed by chance, so random, but I had to accept it, as I had everything else. I learned that there was a wide market for helping yourself, and I looked into it deeply. I studied the techniques and developed my own 5-step formula. From there it was just a snap to write a book, really its pretty easy, especially when you set realistic goals. Most importantly, I learned the secrets of hypnosis, self-hypnosis.

“Through switching off my inputs from the world, and my own quiet study, I learned how I could then buy a house with no money down. I learned to spot good markets, and I learned the 3 critical steps to reselling houses with almost no effort on your part.

“These, of course, you should all know by now, because they are in my book!”

The crowd applauded, and a sea of book covers rose in the hands of the audience.

“And you all know, as part of the Hyp-gnosis self-help and real estate mastery program that you must bring as many people into the fold as possible. You will only get out of the system what you put into it, and what the system needs put into it is new members.

“So, go, now! Out in to the world! Bring them into the fold! With each new member we help ourselves more. We grow more powerful!

“Say it with me: SUCCESS!”

“SUCCESS” the crowd cheered.

“REAL ESTATE!”

“REAL ESTATE!” the crowd began to filter noisily out the back, all the while cheering his name.

The future had worked out well for Morty. The man he had strangled had settled out of court for Morty’s fancy hat, because it was really nice. That was the closest Morty had ever come to being in trouble and he felt revitalized.

He began to study real estate. Not just the empty feel-good seminars, but he began staying up all night studying the similarities in infomercials, he learned what they all had in common, and what they all promised, he began to look at different ways of influencing people and, most importantly, long-winded justifications of why it was right to do anything for money because all he wanted to do was right, but he needed the money to do right so he should sell real estate.

He had an awfully shiny smile to begin with, but he shined it down, nothing chemical, he just used tree bark, pumice, and water from the industrial bleaching pool, another great industrial product designed to make your life better.

He never went back to Dales flower shop, but his trauma from working there, and the only life experience he had thinking on his feet in the presence of really bad ideas provided him more than enough motivation to work tirelessly through other dead end jobs to afford more time to study his real estate seminar motivations.

He used the constantly transient civilization to his advantage, he practiced his ultra-shine, he focused his eyes and trained his voice, he learned the nuances of eye-flutters with very very shiny smiles. He would entrance the homeless kids and move them through town, he spoke with the others and learned their patterns. This provided ample base for negotiating life with the rest of his non-transient community. He had a social life, he managed to work smoothly and was invited to all the parties. He did well to stay away from the Sweltering Fish Boat​, but occasionally went in for a nightcap or an eye-opener.

He had occasional relapses, but mostly avoided mainstream advertising. He never could remember or make a connection to a certain international athlete, but he knew that he had to keep everything face-to-face, or directly, through his now famous home page.

Morty had learned persuasion, slight-of-hand, and the perfuntory mores of the sages decadence. Morty had learned bantering, bartering, flirting, being bashful and all sort of other stupid shit. Morty had finally taken a lifetime of absorbing poorly scripted sitcom fraudelence and had made a rapid adaptation between his new social cues learned from giving seminars to appearing confident and successful to other lonely people that expected the same from life. Morty had learned that he could shine all of his achievements up so that they sounded spectacular. He didn’t have much of a mission. He spoke passionately and directly.

His seminars were hardly a spectacle, taking most of his inspiration directly from the sole power of positive real estate seminar he had seen, and trying to maximize the profits he could make, he sparingly provided styrofoam cups and diluted black coffee to attendees. He held his seminars in modest motels off of the interstate, and simply spent the rest of his time stapling flyers to telephone poles. He really lacked a global vision.

Morty didnt mind, though, he didnt see the costs of assistants or vertical branching to be beneficial because it would dilute the stream of profit coming in. He decided what he really needed was cross brand appeal, so he went back to his market research.

He spent days taping and reviewing syndicated cable infomercials and home shopping networks. He watched the most common trends, and although he kept no notes, he did enjoy many an evening in his underwear in a cheap fold out chair, sitting in his light less apartment drinking vodka and beer out of a boot and watching pre-recorded infomercials on VHS.

Morty needed to tap in to other markets, he needed to know what kind of books people would buy if they didnt just watch real estate infomercials. He was truly over his head. He went through book stores, churches, bus stops, restaurants, he read everything he could, he tried to get a grip for other people’s weaknesses, but was unable.

Then, by just as much of a poorly written chance as his walking into a real estate seminar in a library, he walked into a self-help meeting because he saw it advertised as a social event in the paper.

It was a ‘Self-Entitled Anonymous’ meeting, for the unnecessarily self-entitled. It was full of pasty, whiny snobs, talking about how they should have been more accepted in to a society that they believed existed. Well, that was their problem, at least. It did get in the way of their lives because no one could stand to be around them except for other self-entitled slobs who could sympathize with them, and they could share their angsty tales of lifes woes.

Morty walked in with his extra fancy suit, dressed to wow, breath sparkling of carrots and oil, and said:

“Is this the ‘self-entitled anonymous’ meeting?”

He heard a few polite scoffs and was greeted with a room of indifference, the people already seated continued their endless conversation.

“Well, I should have gone to brown, because my uncle knows someone on the board, really, I had great grades and they wouldnt give me an interview. My dad and uncle are in a feud. Its politics, I tell you.” One whiny little fucker said.

“Yeah, its just not right. I was accepted for a one time study with the banking gnomes of Zurich, I just needed to provide a 118,000 deposit, which I didnt have, and my grandparents wouldn’t give me the money. I mean, I know they have it, they seem like they are living pretty well.”

Morty sat down and just listened. The others continued to ignore him, assuming he was just a newcomer, yet to find his own self-indulgent voice. The conversations varied, but all portayed the person as a victim, somehow deprived of lifes great offerings because of the unreasonableness of the cards stacked against them.

Y’know, the types of folks who should just be dropped off in a bush in the middle of the African plains?

Eventually, the conversations — unmoderated because the organizer was so dissatisfied with his post in life, being relegated to being the organizer, that he abandoned his post to complain about how he should be leading rehab meetings between aging rockstars – came around to self-help books, one member piped up:

“Yeah, they are such a scam, I have an uncle that wrote the original self-help book, but the publisher took his idea for a self-help guide to whale calls and instead published a self-help guide to weight loss two months before his was due to hit the shelfs and buried it. Because of that, I have to work at a donut store!”

Morty balked: “People buy these books? This self-help?”

The crowd murmured and nodded asycopatedly in agreement.

“Why … why don’t you read them?” he asked, puzzledly.

“Its a scam! I fucking told you already!” spat the young whiny self-entitled fucker.

“The real help is in communities, like these, where we can find like minded people with the same victimized past and move beyond it. Or hypnosis.”

Morty had never considered hypnosis.

“Hyp…nosis?”

A dark figure with black eyes stepped through the crowd and up to Morty. Morty had seen the man before, but could not place it. The man stared directly at him, and the bells began to ring in his ear again. It was the disappearing man from the bar a couple chapters ago. Remember?

“And this will still not break you. You have found the answer you sought. Go now.”

From his locked gaze, Morty could begin to see time on the spectrum, he saw the last decade of his own reinvention, he saw his blank life prior. The view receded and he saw his parents lives fade back into post present futurism. He saw his towns shrink and the industry erode back into an agrarian state, he saw giants walking the earth and hordes of indians fighting buffaloe. He pulled back further and saw the earth hanging in space, he saw the contiental drift recede to panacea, and with that, he felt the presence shift.

He drew into the lone continent and viewed it in the prehistory. The jungles were overgrown, each vine tangled and beautiful, the deserts miniscule, only a highlight in the path of desolation they would carve over time. The magnificent mountains absent. He was drawn from the roving plains of the dinosaurs and endless giant reptillian conquests. He was pulled far from the main continent and left hovering over a relatively tiny island.

The island was filled with lizards. He felt time begin to move again, but he stayed focused on the lizards, he watched them grow in size. He watched the larger strains grow, he saw them camp stategically around the smaller society, then gradually organize the smaller into working units.

He saw the rebellion, he saw the inbreeding, he saw the shadowy lizards living outside, growing back in to roles amongst the others. They were marked to his eyes, so he saw them reassimilate, he saw through their chameleon guises, that they had kept while in the shadows. To him, the society hadn’t changed, the separation was more pronounced. The underlings had shed their scales and their blood had turned warm. They grew playful and unassuming. Eventually, they grew tits, and they all jumped in the water, and swam back to the great continent. The dinosaurs were all dead by then.

As the tiny mammal-lizards moved back into the water and shluffed off the dolphins, he hovered, watching the now stranded lizards crowd around the water. Time seemed to slow again, as the lizards created the first piece of mechanical technology: a kickass yach which took them to the mainland much faster than the furries evolution.

And when the mammals crawled back on to Panacea, the lizards were ready.

Morty felt time speed up again. His view pulled from the landing point, and he saw the lizards cautiously mingling back in with the mammals, this time, they would stare down each of the underlings as it approached it. Keeping its gaze, then working with it almost seamlessly. The animals were so quickly duped into this ruse that many smaller species were wiped out from being far too trusting.

Trusting of the lizard hypnosis. Because thats where hypnosis comes from. The overlord lizards, thats how you can’t tell what they are, because you are too busy being in their reality when you see a picture of them oof watch them on TV. In the earlier days it was easy, because the kingdoms were small, and the kingdom always drew a crowd. Naturally there were rebellions and assassinations in the later organzed human tribes, but the malevolence that could disorganize society always came from lizards. Even in modern mutant dolphin tribes, there are undercover lizards that have mastered the sonic tone that can make dolphins brains explode.

Morty kept a broad view of time and space and watched as the continents quickly rearranged themselves, animals evolved, deserts creeped and forests were felled by draughts and fires.

He saw the evolution of humanity, of tribes, societies and kings, and yet he could still see the marks of the lizards. Never a majority, but always in the concentrations of power. They had long since abandoned the lesser species when primates had begun to fasten tools, and stayed closely around each one.

The lizards had been subject to their own evolution. The ones that were too greedy or violent commonly wiped out a specialized species and then were unable to move freely among the mammals and were stomped like their stupid dinosaur cousin lizards. As the millennia turned, the overlord lizards of the past had ripened into man-sized free-thinking lizards that were parasites off of society in a complex way. Having no way to hide their strange personal tastes, these lizards stayed in the fringes of society, but managed to maintain their hypnosis skill and generally used it sparingly to keep a quiet life.

Morty felt himself floating farther out to space as time sped through in to the modern age, as he reapproached the ground, he could see that human society had grown quite advanced, but he could still sense the lizard presence in the context of power.

The vision pulled him down to england, where, he could see the rapid expansion and destruction of many towns around him. He could see patches of destroyed forest, and the occasional village burning like a super-fucking-nova.

In the haze of constant destuction, he could occasionally see a small being, running fleetfoot across the contry side, and razing villages in his path. He would watch it retreat through the the woods, and through tunnels in the land, and lie creeping about. He watched it changed size and lumber through the water. He felt the breeze of time sifting through his hair.

And then he saw Jimmy Beckham move into a small town, he watched all the same trials and tribulations, he saw him struggle to make friends with anyone, and saw him slaughter nunneries full of nuns. Through the countless tragedies, he saw the giant Jimmy Beckham retreat and wait, and reenter society. He saw him treated like a simpleton or outright avoided.

Jimmy Beckham stayed in the english countryside for centuries. Over time, he adapted to the local languages and customs. He would pass through towns disguised as a traveler, hire an escort through the woods, murder him and feed on his eyeball juices. He believed that would make him speak more manly. It didn’t. Though, he did manage to amass quite a stock of pelts and undergarments, which he would then sell to shops in local villages. In time, he managed to accumulate a small fortune, which he hid in his various hideouts in the mountains and the forests. Local legends grew of a horrible troll in the groves, one that would magically decieve travelers and mutilate their faces.

The local legends were exactly right.

As Beckhams years grew on, and he saw how he outlasted the mortals around him, he grew more intricately connected to their cultures, much like the lizard people who had feasted on the misery of the common people and slowly infiltrated their societies and the dawn of humanity, Beckham, clumsily, learned his way through the aristocracies and learned folk, but was often unsuccessful. His demonic tendencies, left him unable of completely understanding the ever changing nuances, and his interpersonal relationships were so few and far between that he never learned the basic tenants of common understandings between people, and his speech was stilted and awkward.

Beckham then turned to shows of power and prowess in order to influence the puny humans around him, he would throw boulders, breathe fire, and bellow a high pitched shriek that would shatter the ceramics of the local artisans. This only confirmed the existance of the evil troll to the townspeople who would, predictably surround him with pitchforks and torches, trying to fend him back to his lair.

Jimmy Beckham had a powerful temper, and many villages were burned to cinders through such a series of misunderstandings. This is why British people all look far more inbred than they should, because all pure blood brits from a time before the great influxes of migrant populations to britain in the last 2 centuries, then they were drawing from a continually narrowing gene pool having been constantly stomped by Beckhams never-ending rage.

Learning through trial and error, Beckham was increasingly cautious about the feats of power he would exhibit, so as not to terrify the puny humans. As he crept through the woods, and ran out of trading routes and random murchants to murder for eyeball juice, he began to sort out the softer feeling fabrics and distinguish himself from the peasants, but not be so noticiable as to be mistaken for a lord or an aristocrat. He balanced between the class systems so that he was always unapproachable. This allowed him to move through society unnoticed, but did not give him a steady income beyond eyeball murder, and his social skills still seemed to be eternally lacking.

Then, one day, he saw a group of filthy urchins playing a simple game with a hogs head. The kicked it very hard and then would scream because they broke their foot. Then the local constabulary would haul them off to the butcher and they would be processed into black pudding to power the sewing circles so that they could make warm coats for the children too weak to break their feet on the hogs head.

Thats just how things were in England.

Beckham, in his rudimentary high-pitched troll squelch, pulled one of his fermented dried pigs bladders, that had aged in the sun. He threw it and nailed a small fat stupid looking child right before he was about to hit the ball. The child reeled back and was stunned, but unharmed. Before the impact, there was an collective yelp, because the brain was the most valuable ingredient in black pudding.e

When the child stood back up, awake, but still stupid, he smiled dumbly, but walked off with a strong, unbroken foot stride, away from the drooling constabulary, who now looked disappointed that his fat bounty had walked off.

There was an awed hush, and the next boy in line walked up, and looking between the hogs head and the bouncy piss bag, he kicked the obvious choice, and screamed in pain.

The constabulary, deflated with this skinny, gamey meat, looked dejected as he hauled the kid away to be disembowled and fed to the delicious pigs. The next child, however, was uncommonly smart. He kicked the bladder, and it soared through the air. The child looked at Beckham stunned, Beckham gave his war cry and the child ran off in the distance, following the bouncing pig bladder.

The remaining children of the village, looked at each other, and their two choices, their injured playmate being tied to the alter of monarchical sacrifice, or the boy running in to the sunset, playfully chasing a pigs bladder.

After dividing themselves up into the groups that seemed more appealing, they said their final farewells, and ran off, most of them laughing at the emo kids who chose death.

There was a now puzzled group of townsfolk, the adults, now, cowering around Beckham. They were unsure what to make of the new phenomenon, let alone the one who had brought it. Nervously, one villager stepped forward, with a hesitant smile, he made a few gestures to Beckham, who responded in his best English, forged by centuries of observation and interaction.

“Wow! You made a pigs skull that doesnt hurt your foot, you smell like a bull!”

“Foot … bull?”

Indeed, this was the beginning of futbol, or as non-communists call it, soccer.

The village, naturally, thrived, having all the next children live and manage to be at least not murdered by that particular ritual. The pastime spread through the neighboring towns and became quite popular in comparison to murdering and eating their children, and the vile demonic troll was somehow cast in a brighter light, if only the relative glow of a depraved society.

He remained murderous at heart, but had become recognized as a harmless outcast, and would have had difficulty traveling anonymously as he had before. He could no longer murder villagers for their eyeball fluid, and since that was just his own mental folklore that had no bearing on is morality or mortality, it soon faded from his mind as a necessity. Though he did still make it a habit to murder local fauna for fun, but that was pretty much because he was into killing animals, and that just meade him a local legend of one who was a great hunter. The person who had intoduced futbol to them, the same person responsible for the socialism that would infect and destroy their society centuries later.

Beckham finally began to feel as though he belonged in a community. He enjoyed being famous without being a prentetious bore or a predictable slob like the rest of artistocracy. He was someone who was just well known, and really only for some simplistic achievements, he was just someone different enough to not be known personally, but enough was known collectively to make for harmless gossip. He was the first British celebrity.

This was not without its problems. He was still not personally accepted by any class of society, while they all seemed pleased to meet them, and he could always find accomodation, people always seemed relieved when he was gone. His tiny troll brain, assumed it was because he was a caustic high pitched shrieking man bitch from hell. HE was wrong though, people in britain in that day aand age were too fucking stupid to not die of chronic diarrhea so they were certainly not of the path of enlightenment that would have them be able to recognize other worldly evil when they saw it.

On the contrary, they felt his otherworldly resonance as only a measure of their inferiority, their infatuation was that of deification and they could not manage to bring themselves to treat him as an equal.

Beckham began to feel truly at odd as the few consistent acquaintances that he did make began to age. The young parents of the original futbol kids began to grow to old men and women, yet he only kept cutting his hair short on the jagged rocks outside his cave. As they began to die off, beckahm founded himself reclusive, not only for the loss of the only people who would tolerate him after centuries in the countryside, but also because he had not aged, because he was being a curiosity and the younger generations shied away from, him. The gossip turned sour, bearing traces of the still lingering legends of evil in the woods. He was, after all, still mutilating animals and leaving their corpses in trails around the villages. Old habits die hard.

So, again, he took to the shadows, his clothes faded and he began living back in his abodes in the mountains, in the forests, he also had an underwater cave, that only he could access with his massive death breathing lungs.

So he faded from view, and from memory, but he had left his mark. The negative connotation of his later life separating him from the noticeable deeds of futbol and celebrity. These seeds, now planted in the remaining societies, grew and shaped the mediocrity of future britain, all the while sowing the later seeds of socialism that turned them all into a bunch of inbred buck toothed big eared whoremongers.

Jimmy Beckham then had created the framework for integrating into society, and in his later pondering, in his deeply underwater cave, he began to think of other activities he could excel at. He was not an expert in the language, and could not understand society or even follow a slightly abstract conversation, so he began to think of his own disruptions.

For example, he shot Abraham Lincoln. John Wilkes Booth was just a guy delivering a pizza because Lincoln had the munchies.

But England was his home base. He would occasionally leave traces of radioactive material outside prominent scientists dwellings in the hopes it would kill them or make them something worth fighting. For fun, he would grow to a monstrous size and wander along the bottom of the ocean, trying to scare whales and threatening giant squid.

Even Jimmy Beckham had a sense of humor.

And as he covered the world, killing, and devouring in his insatiable appetite, he watched as the world of puny humans grew. He found he was passable as a worldly Englishman in many far off lands and managed to coast by on his invulnerability and knowledge of making games from fermented animal parts. He became wise to the ways of the world and became a quick environmental adapter. In far off lands he was often confronted, and soon learned not to unleash his demonic man bitch troll power unless he simply could not appear human in his attacks. He murdered many martial arts masters just for the fucking hell of it, just because he could. He was still an asshole piece of Eurotrash, but he also learned how to kick the fuck out of a door.

And each time he returned home. He saw the bloodlines merge, he saw the ones he first met as children grow through awkwardness into miserable adult lives, and then die from natural causes.

Natural causes today, means dieing in your sleep or shitting blood until you hemorrhage. Back then it meant getting syphillus from a chicken, beaten to death by a ram, or boiled alive in acid stew. The towns flourished, and outside from their occasional terrors, grew and the memories of Beckhams direct influence faded.

Beckham, coming from his worldly travels, would take to the rooftops, and listen to the tavern gossip, he would watch the interactions and spy on the peoples daily lives. He recognized a few people as being direct descendents of those he had once known, and watched the rituals. Amongst it, he spotted many popular childrens games that had developed and the various competitions. Beckham knew that he had a way in, he simply needed to reacclimate to the new attires and mannerisms.

A Century wiser, he retreated back, and practiced his affectations in the mirror of the ponds in the caves of his mountain habitat, he began to travel through the towns and watch the local sports games. He then retreated to his woodland habitat and practiced his many kicking techniques against the various bladders of the animals he had murdered.

And so he sat there again, the time passing immaterially. He kicked and trained and murdered and kicked. He got really good at all those things, especially kicking because he did that twice as much as the training and murdering.

What Beckham lacked was the personal touch, he needed better control over the people than simply wowing them with his poor satan troll english.

Morty fled his job, and the scene of the assault, and walked quickly in the opposite direction of the customer. He didnt recognize them, and Dale didnt know much about Morty’s personal life, but he could still be tracked down. It was a small town, after all.

Morty kept down the streets and tried to not look too suspicious, but did not want to go home, in case the police were called. He really wanted to avoid that confrontation. He turned off of the path back to his place, and began walking toward the library. He hadn’t heard any police sirens, or screaming. Maybe the man would just forget about it, or maybe he was so terrified, it being a small town, that word would get back and they would be susceptible to vengeance.

He made it into the library, and noticed that there was a seminar scheduled that day. There was a sign that read ‘The Power of Positive Real Estate.’

Morty slipped through the door, and found a seat in the back. The seminar had not started yet, and people were just taking their seats and assessing the rest of the audience.

Morty didnt really know what this was about, but there was something in the back of his mind telling him that he should try persuing real estate, that there was something fulfilling that he had not encountered in the flowersmithing business.

He used his ungloved hands to feel his smooth, indestructible face, then looked down. He was still wearing the apron, persistently dirty and that was sticking out. He quickly excused himself, went to the bathroom, and stuffed the apron into the garbage can.

He slinked back into the seminar, and chose a different seat. Being dressed in his fancy suit, he managed to blend in better to the semi-formal crowd.

Ten minutes passed, and he was still staring at the stage. There had been some bustling around, new people entering and finding their seats. Then, the lights slowly dimmed, and a lone spotlight shone in the center of the stage.

It was a small room, a multi-purpose type room in a public building that had been arranged by a private corporation trying to spread goodwill through real estate. The room itself could not have held more than 100 people, and it was not a packed house. Morty looked around, but did not recognize anyone, and had apparently missed the flyer given out earlier explaining the purpose and mission statement of the group.

A small man in a very fancy suit walked out into the light, standing in front of the podium and speaking into the microphones.

“Hello! Hello Courage Falls, Hello Minnesota!”

The man paused for the scattered applause.

“I am here today to tell you about something. Its a personal experience, it changed my life.

“Ten years ago, I was a mess, I was overweight, under-employed and friendless. I had no money, no future, I hated my job, and was beginning to think the world was hopeless. I had wrecked my credit, and my ex-wife was just then filing for divorce.

“Yes, things looked black for me, but then I discovered something. I discovered mastery of my own discontent. I learned how to make business deals, and how to spot opportunities, where before I just found misery.

“I found a new way of life, and more importantly, a new way of thinking. A positive way of thinking. And I used it to sell real estate!

“And thats why I am here today, I want to share these secrets with you, I want you to be able to think positively , and feel better about yourselves. I want you to be the success that you can make yourselves. I want you to be better people through Real Estate!”

He held his arms up, as though declaring a mutual victory, he mugged and posed, and waited for the applause to burst through the silence.

Again it was scattered, he reacted as though the house was coming down.

“Yeah, thats more like, it right? Huh? C’mon people, you shouldnt just be applauding for me, its all about you guys! C’mon! Lets feel that positivity!”

Morty was enthralled. He saw the man, standing, like he saw himself in his dream. He saw him simply gesture and receive applause, it seemed as though he had a power over people that was just given to him.

Morty knew he had to figure out how to do this.

He was a little too excited to listen properly to the rest of the seminar, but it was uninteresting, it mostly involved buying a series of books on tape and running yourlsef into debt by lying on loan application forms. Unlike many other slick real estate scams, this one was very direct with how it defrauded people, they just didnt give the details, saving them for the books, or the audio books for the illiterate scheming future real estate mogul.

Morty sat there, his mind reeling with new ideas, new potential. He had found his calling, perhaps? Something about the phrase ‘real estate’ seemed so right. He started thinking of ways he could have his own seminar. What he would like to tell the people who came to his seminar. A myriad of myriads would really be the best way to describe this because Morty was just so fucking inspired. Somewhere between the mind breakdown, the pointless assault, the immediate descent into alcoholism, and probably some other weird shit that I have forgotten about writing while I was doing this because I have been completely fucking shit hammered through writing this whole fucking thing.

If that makes sense.

Yep, so thats what Morty was doing. He was sitting in a dark room, rubbing his smooth indestructible face in his fancy suit, he was smiling his shiniy smile so shiniliy now that he was practically lighting up the room. Occasionally, he would catch an ovation and clap along out of instinct, but the details of the presentation had long since bypassed his ears.

Morty’s fists were sweating, his lip was trembling, he was breathing heavily. The time at Dale’s had already flickered from his memory, he had slipped into the real estate mentalitiy like a square peg in a square hole in a really easy childerns puzzle. It was fucking right. Morty was finally doing something that he wanted to.

Or, at least he now wanted to get on the path to doing something he wanted. Something that was right. And what could be more right than real estate?

“And that!” the little man in the suit said sharply, bringing Morty back down to earth, “that! is the overview, that is the plan that will make you think more positively about yourselves. When you have achieved the positivity, with the emphasis on real estate while actioning your positivness matricies, you will suddenly find you are more knowledgeable, and more authentic in terms of selling real estate. You will be able to do it all!

REAL ESTATE!”

The rest of the crowd stood up, clapping, and Morty followed suit. He felt energized, he felt that this had suddenly tied off the loose ends and opened doors he had never imagined.

And then he began to think about the last time he heard about a real estate seminar.

“Wasn’t …” he throught “…wasn’t that the same athlete on the electrolysis flyer? Whats been happening to me …”

Morty was feeling to enlightened to be pulled down, but he began to wonder what kind of power could cause such a disrupting effect on such a seemingly normal person.

Having lived through the weekend, and polished himself nicely, with his fancy suit properly febreezed and his hat ready to go. He admired his new cleanly shorn, yet indestructible face in the mirror and walked out a whistilin.

In the morning sun, everything that had happened before, even waking up in the park all seemed like a distant memory, and he wore the shineiest smile anyone had ever seen in Courage Mininesota at this time of year. He skipped down the steps of his apartment and back up the familiar main road. There was no sign of Alouicious, and he almost had forgotten about him as well. His mind was being spent getting into the zone for working at Dale’s with his flower smithery. He passed by the haunts that had strung him through the last several days, the bar, the alleys, the electrolysis shack. All along the way to the flower shop.

Dale’s wasnt the nicest building in town, it was a squat square building with a faded navy blue paint job and a light pink trim. The windows seemed perpetually cloudy and the store managed to face away from any convenient angles for sunlight. Its interior was lit with dingy yellow flourescent lights that buzzed almost constantly, bathing the store in a sickly light that made everything but the plants look green.

Morty tried at flowersmithing like he did with everything else, but just wasnt very good at it. Either that, or the town was too small to need a specialized flower shop, so no one would have probably bought his bouquets anyway. That didnt stop Morty from trying. He put his bright white apron on, and his fancy gardeners gloves and sat there cutting and arranging flower bouquets for all sorts of reasons: funerals, prom, that kind of shit that people expect flowers for.

This wasnt helped by Dale, the shops proprietor. Dale was a middle aged woman who could not seem to understand that she was crazy. She was not unattractive, but dressed like an ’80s nightmare and talked loud with a thick accent. She loved flowers, but couldnt stand touching them. Flowers, to her, were actually a wonderful social contrivance, and she spent her days imagining wonderful new scenarios that all the wonderful people would naturally want to buy her wonderful bouquets.

“Morty,” she would say, “today, lets try making a new type of bouquet: anniversary of buying a second pet! It will be wonderful, we can make a nice little bouquet, and a sign that says ‘today only! buy yourself a bouquet for the anniversary of getting your second pet. There has to be someone out there in that strange, wonderful, workaday world and can just walk in and get just want they need for something they hadnt even thought about.

“Morty, can you do that for me? Can you make a bouquet that just screams ‘Second Pet Anniversary day?’”

And so it would go. Each day, there were new asinine plans, every day, Morty would smile, and agree and do his best to come up with flower bouquets that would match her fleeting, abstract ideas. He would smile, and he would try.

On the off chance that the store did have a customer, they would often walk in with a simple request, and leave quite puzzled.

“I’d like a dozen roses, please,” they would say.

And Morty would then have to explain, and give them the tour of the weeks bouquets. There would be the festive second pet anniversary, the more morbid ex-girlfriends dads funeral, the selective service registration bouquet. He would walk them through the various offerings, which were almost invariably, expensive and exotic, never a simple selection for a standard birthday or wedding day.

The one time of year when things seemed to make sense was valentines day. Unfortunately, Dale would use this as an opportunity to deck the store in plastic red roses which were not for sale.

“Why would I want fresh roses? I would just have to replace them all to decorate the store next year!”

This would of course bring in far more people than average, and Morty was left explaining that the roses they were looking for were just decoration and that they only available bouquets were the once being arranged capriciously for nonsense reasons that week.

Dale had very little aesthetic sense, and really only saw flowers as a vehicle for coming up with new special occasions that people should be thankful for, and creating artificial reasons to sell extremely rare and exotic flowers at prices far higher than the average working class citizen of Courage Falls.

And so Morty showed up day after day. The job went no where, but he didnt know what else he could do. He never really gave it any thought. He had amassed a forgettable resume of working class and retail experience, but could not seem to remember what any of those jobs were, and his only memory of getting this one was simply walking in the store to try to get directions. Dale hated the public, and doubly hated having to explain her vision to every asshole that walked in wanting a dozen roses for their goddamn miserable wives. She was so relieved to hear something other than such common flowers or peoples actual needs for something other than what she wanted that she jumped at the opportunity to give Morty directions.

And a job.

So, now, as he smiled his way down the street, he walked onwards to the inevitable decay of his own attitude.

Were Dale an ordinary business type person, she would have wised up or closed the shop, or at least learned how to do the work herself, but she was wealthy from some earlier inheritance that she never spoke of. Morty just assumed she was a widow.

He stepped in to Dale’s, feeling better than he could remember feeling recently, having almost completely shook off the remnants of his debauchery. He stepped out of the sunlight and into the shaded, buzzing green flourescence.

“Morty!” Dale came practically singing out of the back room, looking around.

“Morty, Morty, Morty, my you are so handsome this morning,” she handed him his apron, “I’d like to go over some new ideas with you. Over the weekend, I developed a new paper work system so I can introduce my ideas more effectively.

As the last traces of the morning sunlight left Morty, and he felt the darkness creeping in, his mind wandered from the details of the new filing system. He nodded along, but his concentration was lapsing.

She finished going over the complications of the new metrics and left. Morty stood there: suit, apron, gloves, his arms at his side. He stood at the counter, unaware of the days concept, he couldnt even remember the last bouquets he had made. The stoor seemed utterly unfamiliar.

He stood there dazed, his mind was completely blank. He peered out the window, his body motionless. He watched the silent streets, the occasional car passing by. There were no pedestrians, save a few young transients, hustling by. The alleys were motionless, at least from where he was standing.

It was well into the afternoon when a customer came wandering in.

“Hi, Im just looking for a dozen roses, me and the little ladies anniversary today, y’know.”

“We dont have a dozen roses.”

“What do you have?”

Morty drew a blank. Again. He was not smiling, he was not even looking at the customer, he was still standing motionless, staring out the window. Dale had left in the morning for some undisclosed errands, and had not returned. Morty seemed uninterested in helping the man, and eeven less interested in explaining why they didnt carry the one fucking thing that every single fucking person who came in the store wanted.

Morty was beginning to feel like he had had enough.

“Look, Mister, I’d like to help you, I really would, we dont have what you want. We dont have normal flowers, we dont have things people want to give their wives, and if we did, it would costs more than you would ever want to pay for it. Why dont you just get a divorce, huh? You’re an ugly fuck, so your wife is either cheating on you, blind, or even uglier. No matter what, that’s grounds for a divorce. Why dont you just go back out to the fields, find some farmers horse and just fuck it. The horses wouldnt run from you, because you look like a horse you ugly fucking piece of shit.”

“Excuse me?”

“No, look motherfucker, I am not excusing you because you fucking heard me and you fucking know I’m right. I bet you aren’t even fucking married, I bet you dont have friends I bet your fucking ass just walked in here to try to convince someone that you actually had a wife because you have no one to fucking talk to. Well, motherfucker, I have something to tell you, so you better open your fucking ears: I AM NOT YOUR FUCKING PATSY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER, I AM MORTY FUCKING SHARP!”

“Grrbhjjb”

Morty looked down and saw the mans words being choked by Morty’s gloved hands, he broke himself a way and staggered back against the wall. The man buckled and fell to his knees, looking at Morty in terror, he regained his words and backed slowly towards the door, on his knees, mouthing words, but unable to speak them. When he reached the back of the shop, he broke and ran.

Morty sat, staring at his hands. He shook his head quickly, dropped the gloves and followed suit out the door.

Morty opened his eyes up. It was still dark, he was in an alley slumped against a utility pole. A thin string of drool trickled from his lip and hung suspended just above his lapel. He was conscious, but his breathing still sounded like snoring. He once again pulled himself to his feet and wiped his mouth clean. He didnt wear a watch, so he had no idea what time it was.

“At least I got to sleep for a little while.” thought Morty.

‘Whereabouts am I?”

He looked down the alley and tried to get the wherewithal to stumble back toward the street. Some nameless 80′s tune echoed in the hollows of his skull. The melody was just beyond comprehension, and the words were subdeued to dully scraping syllables. It was out of rhythm from the pounding of his head.

He stumbled back into the main street, spots bathed in the pale glow of the street lights. The background activities heard earlier seemed absent, and the town hung in a ghostly silence. There was the lightest pitter patter tracing in circles outside the circle of the lights.

“Its probably that goddamn dog,” thought Morty.

His Minnesotan politeness had begun to fade in the events of the weekend.

“This is wrong, I was trying to sleep, I was trying …”

He stopped, his mind stuttered, his thoughts stammered.

“Try…”

“…I have to try, I have to do right…”

His muscles clenched, and he perched upright, swaying ever so slightly, like a broomstick standing on end. The combination of seizures, celebrities, and electrolysis had peeled away the myriad barriers built between his latent critical sense and the barriers of his own society and sheer, pointless acceptance. His own societal inclinations of trust had been burnt away and his primordial survival instincts were taking hold.

“Need to get my message. Need money for the message. Need money to do right.”

Morty then realized he had not been breathing for the last minute or so, and quickly relaxed his chest muscles, he gasped in air, and lost his equilibrium. He stumbled forward again, and caught himself on the wall. He could feel his thoughts and his frame, and some new sensations. His mortal instincts warring with his repressed consciousness, his abused body resisting the pressure he was putting it under.

“Keep going.”

He lurched forward, slumped over, his body still in half paralysis, jerking like a syphillitic. Clutching at his shoulder and strugglilng to breath. As his body relaxed, he melted into a pronounced limp. He had no idea where he was or how to get home. It was dark and cold out, and he probably had work the next day. If he still had a job.

He carried on, again, lost, stumbling through the streets. Had he been more social, more active in the community, he would have been spotted by a friend earlier. Had he any common sense, he would have just stayed in. Were he not Minnesotan, he would have known better than to drink a pint glass full of hard liquor and nighttime cold medicine.

Morty had never learned these things, because he had never done anything, he had only tried. Having made his personality and endless cycle of chasing the limited persona of those that were presented to hin, characters that spoke with no accent, whos lines were always witty and wry, where each character could dominate the conversation when appropriate, and no one ever interrupted. Where each individual problem was downcast into a universal human inconvenience with a pre-scripted answer, he had never learned to use his own adaptability to face the daily tribulations of life, and lumbering along through the alleys in the after hours, his descent into the fringes not marked by entertaining anecdotes and harrowing terror, but the random appearance of images of a particular international athlete and sunglasses model. His tolerance and moderation undeveloped because he had simply never exposed himself, by fear or taboo, or social incompetence, he had simply just missed the common experience of learning through pain.

Now, stunningly over-sensitive to the normal happenings of workaday life, pulled from his bubble by circumstance, he was lost, alone, and his perfectly constructed thoughts planted by his controlled environment were suddenly absent. The void in his psyche was being encroached by the hostile swill that had been burgeoning in the recesses of his mind. The reality he had lived in had caused such an unaccepting and completely constructed simplification, that it had created partitions in his brain that left the outskirts developing in isolation, with no way to adjust its impulses.

His id was taking over.

But he was still downtrodden, he needed to recuperate. He reached the end of the building he had been leaning on, and folded back into an alley. He slumped with his back against the wall, and his feet slipped and he shuddered to the ground.

“psst….hey!” a gravelly voice whispered in the darkness.

Morty rolled his head sloppily over to the alley. It was pure darkness, far from the sparse lighting of the street.

“What are you doing here, kid? This is my alley… you one of the new ones?”

Morty sat there dazed, reconstructing neural pathways with his newfound self. He smiled his famous shining smile, and answered in a long stuttering drawl.

“I’m Morty, mister, I’m trying, I have to do right.”

“Well, kid, this is my place, my land, you see, I stake this out, I keep out the rats and weasels, and I got traps all over here to keep those damn kids out.”

“Your … land?”

“I own this, kid, real estate, you can’t stay here less I say so, so I wanna know what you’re doing here.”

In the shadows, Morty’s eyes were adjusting, and he could see the distant outline of a face in the shadows, it was hard to see the details, but it looked like he had a short white beard and long hair.

“I just… I … can’t move, mister, I’m sorry”

“Ahhh, shit, another fucking junkie. Look, I know you’re on the streets, but you gotta keep it together even for that, you just die otherwise. Whaddya, got, toss it over, ill get rid of it for ya.”

“Drugs?”

“Yeah, I hear ya, I’ve been there too, how I ended up in this hole. Used to talk too much, too. This doesn’t take a lot to keep running, I can still have my fun on the weekends. Just gotta stay professional.”

“Pro…fessional?”

“Sure kid, you ever wonder why there are so many other bums in town? You can’t be new to this, every homeless person in the state passes through here at some point, its the beverly hills of homelessness, you can get a nice place out in the fields, or something more modern and urban, like this alley. It’ll cost ya, though, and you have to fit the right personality to be able to move in. We try to keep a sane community here and we want our permanent residents to help that grow. We maintain a very high bar for membership.”

“Homeless membership?”

“Homeless membership. Basic things. If you’re serious about setting up here, I can schedule a conference, but right now its my office hours, so I gotta stay available here.”

“I … have an apartment.” Morty blinked, puzzled at the information he was receiving.

“Apartment? Ha, well, la de da, mister fancy suit. I bet you spend your whole day working so you can sleep in a place thats smaller than an alley, I bet you live off of television and carrots. I bet you have to lie about the things you like just so you can pretend like you have friends. I bet you go through painful procedures just to look the way you think other people want you to look.”

Morty sat blinking.

“Look, kid, if you have an apartment, you should stay off the drugs at least, whatever has got you knocked out for this long is gonna stop you from running on your hampster wheel. Yeah, I know what hampster wheels are, I had a hampster when I was a kid, back when I embraced the same life.

“There were other things, too, I had my problems with the drugs, and the responsibility, had no family or friends, no safety net, and I landed on the streets. Used to have a nice fancy suit like that too. I used to save all my money so that twice a year, I could get extra strength teeth whitening just so my smile would shine.

“Turns out that shit just melts the enamel, and not having a natural layer of bacteria is murder on your teeth. I needed to get ivory replacements, it bankrupted my normal budget and I couldnt afford all my drugs. And there is was, my vanity caused me to lose everything. Also, I went to jail for attempted murder.”

Morty was beginning to lose focus, the goblins in the back of his head were starting to scream and this mans ravings were focused but surreal. He tried to pick himself up and collapsed back into the heap of himself.

The old man continued. “Yeah, thats right, you landed here, you probably won’t get up yet. Look, kid, this is a place of business, I appreciate the chat, but if I get more customers, I might ask them to drag you out to the street. I get large parties here, sometimes, usually a bunch of kids wanting to chip in on a big place. I can’t do that though, I send them down to the loading docks, thats were the cheap stuff is. I only deal with singles, high rollers in the underground. Most of them have sway and personnel. I tell ya kid, this real estate business is big.”

The blackness of the alley began to lighten into a monochrome gray and faded to white, the words trailed off into echoes, he was aware of his pupils and they were expanding wider than his eyes, his ideas numbed and his consciousness faded.

“KID!”

He jerked back awake.

“Dont make me get out of my desk and drag you out myself, you wouldnt like it, I wouldnt like it. You make good conversation, but you can’t sleep here, this isnt a halfway house. You might try one of the churches down the road, but they don’t much like people in the middle of the night, and the clientèle is worse than those damn kids. You ain’t passing out here.”

Morty’s irritability was surpassing his failure to stand. This didnt make sense, he knew it, but whatever had been eating his brain alive the past few days was starting to chew on that. He had no filters for what to not believe, all facts came with equal authority, his judgement was skewed.

He rolled over on his stomach and clutched at the ground, he dragged himself out of the alley, the face in the distance continued to ramble on about his offerings and listings, the availability and the selective community membership he maintained. He pulled himself, inch by inch, back out into the street. His arms were less fatigued and he could feel his body loosening up and regaining control, as though he was being allowed to move again. He gradually pulled himself to his knees and continued crawling along the ground, again noticing the pitter patter in the background. He breathed heavily to drown out any distractions and pushed himself back down towards his apartment.

Of course he didnt make it.

He gradually got back to his feet and pushed along, leaning on the walls, passing through a small manufacturing area between the main street and the back alleys of his apartment. He staggered up the street and collapsed into the door frame.

Apparently, it was late, but not so late that the bar wasnt closed.

The bartender seemed concerned that the man he had kicked out earlier for passing out had just managed to collapse back into the bar. He began talking rapidly in a language beyond Morty’s comprehension, though it might have been english.

Being inside an organized space refreshed him considerably, it was still new, but not as unfamiliar as lying in an alley. His eyes fluttered, and each blink brought him rushing back from the edge.

“OK, too much sleeping, here one for you, wake you up. On the house now. Dont fall over!”

Morty had learned the response when handed a drink, and his politeness layer was rebuilding. He drained the vodka and hot coffee in a lone draught. The television flicked listlessly in the background, with sports highlights and deoderant commercials.

“Morty’s BACK!” Morty shouted. He was energized.

Morty felt energized, and angry, walked stridently to the bar and ordered another several pints of hot coffee and vodka. He with each gulp he felt more powerful, he felt back in control, as though his mind was forming one cohersive piece of meat. He fought through the pain, he pushed his body back in line, and re-learned his politeness. He was jocular with the locals and charming to the ones he was tipping. He hated his piece of the earth and his distance from it, his willing amnesia was helping forget it. He stopped trying and just went with the instinct. His pain faded, his blankness had taken form.

Morty had never broken a bone, barely even stubbed a toe. Having had an indestructible face, he was completely unaware of that as a vulnerability. The continuous, enormous mental and physical pain he had lived through in the past few days had begun to give a swollen comfort to his psychological situation.

And stepping through the crowds of winos, pushing them aside with his laughter, running the laps of self-aggrandizement and endless advertisement. He was wild and showed them all the funniest parts of the most popular TV shows he had watched. He was quick with references, and cared genuinely about peoples feelings. He couldnt stop talking, he couldnt stop blinking. For once, he stopped worrying about doing right, because everything he did felt right.

As before, his consciousness slipped away, but he also managed to remain cogent. He retained some coherence, and never once looked at the TV, he just followed the trail of conversations and floated along the stream. The hour was running late, and he was running to catch up, but his low tolerance brought him down to the line immediately.

He stumbled, cawed and smirked his way down the bar, and at the end caught a glimpmse of a dark figure sitting in the shadow, around the corner, at the bar. He was cloaked in a bulkly black overcoat, and sat sullen, slumped over a clear drink, hiding behind his hair.

Not content to be the life of the party, Morty felt obligated to bring everyone into the late night wino party.

The man sat silently, motionless for a few seconds, then turned and stared coldly at Morty. He was too drunk to notice, and just stood there smiling the useless jackass that he was.

The man stared cold, unflinchingly, and narrowed his eyes. He held his gaze at Morty for several seconds, then moved his gaze back to the center of the bar and stared off into the distance.

Morty’s brain was murky and drunk, his thoughts had retreated back to the far corners, and he felt as though he had adopted a personality from one of the television situation comedies that he liked so much.

“I sure am entertaining,” thought Morty. “I am amusing the living fuck out of these people. I am so … “

And in the back of his head was a single tone. Like the emergency broadcasting system. It started as a slight background resonance with the TV, and grew to a deafening shreik.

“THERE!” he thought, the sound breaking into the sound of exploding glass and shit. It was fucking awesome.

Morty shook his fucking head back into the present tense. He was looking back at the man, and trying to think of something clever to say when he heard a commercial in the background.

“Are you suffering from repressed catholic night terrors? Do you wake up from nightmares involving school uniforms and holy sacraments? Are you frightened of even a venal sin, but relishing your corpulence? If so, you need to try Cathlosil, the clinically proven formula for removing all traces of false guilt that can’t be confessed away, just listen to the workings of its patented formula inventor:”

A very young looking actor in doctors scrubs with a stethoscope around his neck filled the screen.

“Hello, I am doctor Craig Fishlington, inventor of Cathlosil, the #1 cure for Catholics. It started out with me addressing the mortal question: if you confess your sins away, what happens when you feel guilty for not believinig in redemption of confession. Thats when I realized that Catholics (which I am not, nor have ever been), are just wrong.”

The doctor walked through the staged background pointing at small fauna, squirrels and shit.

“You see, I am not taking a position on god, religion, or personal faith. I just think that Catholicism, by nature of the fact that its more popular than McDonalds, has an ex Hitler youth brigade member as its infallible head, and run by pedophiles who determine the punishment of your transgressions and rape your children, that its basically wrong. This has nothing to do with the good people who have their chosen faith as Catholicism, most of them just don’t know any better, they are hopeless indoctrinated stooges. Seriously, there are other religions predicated on preserving rituals that Catholicism has perverted for political reasons centuries ago. Also, they had a tendency to murder scientists or people who disagreed with them.”

The doctor smiled a broad, angry smile.

“I am not a doctor. I am an actor dressed as a doctor. You may wonder why you are seeing me on TV. Well, Ill tell you why, someone hired me to try to hawk their product, but I prefer the direct approach.

“If you are Catholic and actively believe it, you are wrong and fucked up. If there were a god, he would not be on your side. I also dont believe in god, but that is entirely independent of you and your misguided beliefs.

“While we havn’t found a problem with humanities natural inclination towards spirituality (yet), Catholicism as an organized religion is only a result of its causticism and unending bloodlust.

“This pill will not fix Catholicism, this will not make you unbirth your children or actually believe that condoms are not a conspiracy by people trying to spread aids. You might not be tolerant of gays or blacks or muslims (or all three). You will, however, be able to live your life without kneeling down to a pedophile or clapping your hands with some beads.

“Order now, and you get a daily affirmation diary. This brightly colored book contains several pages of ‘writing mantras’. Each mantra is in the shape of a letter, and each letter has a delightful outline, which you can trace along a series of guide lines. Lets look at one now.”

The good doctor pulled out a pen.

“Oh, look, the first one is the capital letter ‘A’. Ill just use this handy dandy pen for my ‘writing mantra’, I start at this corner,” the doctor began tracing the letter from the lower left corner, “it starts at the vanilla line, gets a taste of strawberry on the way up, a lick of chocolate, and slides past the strawberry and stops at vanilla. But ‘A’ is greedy, it goes back for a long stiff bite of strawberry.

“Wasnt that fun? Wasn’t that mediatative, don’t you already feel like you are over your stupid fucking inbred religion for assholes? Dont you wish you hadnt wasted your life caring for too many children birthed to a misogynistic asshole who was probably sodomized as a child by the same fat old man who makes you spank yourself because you mixed cotton and linen and had it beaten in you your whole life because there is a giant monster in the sky who controls everything and will make you burn in fire for eternity if you sin against his mortal sons mother because he loves you?”

“Caholosil, I really did invent it.

“Its a great drug. You might be wondering how much I would charge for this. Well, thats always a hard question. Typically, a lifelong catholic is left traumatized either directly by the perverted members of the church, or by beatings inflicted by being raised in a traditionally catholic family. In modern times, the dependence on telling your sins and ‘evil’ thoughts has been misplaced from a pervert who was incapable of being a finger painting teacher to illiterate geriatric coma patients, to someone who’s parents paid for a college education and pursued a degree but was too inarticulate to pursue humanities, and too stupid to pursue real science ended up being convinced that they could solve other people problems even though they were miserable unfilfilled people. Instead of church coffers, you write a check for therapy, and the good ones even give you better drugs than wine and crackers.

“This wont fix that. I can’t even guarantee that the pills will do anything. In fact, if you are catholic and even thinking that these thoughts make sense, then you probably dont need the drug, you just need to stop going to church and abandon your ‘community’.

“Now, this will make me very unpopular with those who have built their lives around congregating. Its important to know, though, that those people are not your friends, and you are not theirs, you are only sociable because of a routine that has been beaten into your collective skulls. You only know each other because you are guilt tripped into your stupid fucking religion. Your lives are empty because they are devoid of spirituality and replace insight with routine and punishment.

“Some of you are even twice as useless and are active church goers in therapy. You have embraced the double edged sword of self victimization and self righteousness, you are addicted to finding something outside of your self with rigid, predefined rules to give you your own validation because you are too cowardly and worthless to use your own god evolved brain to think about an issue.

“Now, you may have guessed that I, the handsome actor doctor who hates you and your stupid fucking religion might have some personal motivation in selling you a product to convince you that you are a fucking worthless moron who has wasted their life ruining other people lives and just spreading fucking misery to all people who dont believe in the bullshit you believe in even though that bullshit keeps you a fucking miserable stooge.

“Yes, Catholicism is not so much a religion as a cult of insane misery, you people should carry your crosses on your back and walk off a fucking cliff, according to your Galileo murdering beliefs it would make you fall to the ground faster, and you would meet your mythical god and join the great ranks of all the other good catholics who engendered the crusade and murdered foreign babies in the name of their one true god.”

The actor doctor put down his pen, and wiped away the froth that had built up around his lips during his endless rant.

“And you watched that, you fucking Catholics watched me fill out the spelling book, you watched in rapture, in distraction, waiting for the answer, the one hint I can sell you. You believed that Catholicism is wrong and are waiting for the guidance from a trusted source, you want to know how much im going to charge.

“You want to know the fucking penance to pay. Do you see how fucked up you are? Do you understand why I hate catholicism? Why are you still watching this commercial? I am a reprehensible person who inherited all their money and spend it buying infomercial time to talk about how much I hate catholicism.”

The doctor actor pointed his finger at the screen and smiled broadly.

“So fuck all your stupid douche bag dildo licking cum-tart dog felching donkey fisting chigger having catholics. There are no pills, there are no answers. Believe in god, sure, but everything you have build your life and culture around is completely and totally fucked. If you really believed in a literal hell, all of the mortal men you idolize will be burning there forever, and that you have no chance of getting into hell. Do you really want to be part of a cult where a grizzled old man who want to fuck a little boy in the ass is the vessel of god and authorized to tell you that you are pure?”

“There is no Catholicil. It is just fucking common sense, wake up you use shitbags and stop ruining life for all the people around you. If you dont come to your senses, I hope you choke to death on your sunday wine pretending you are drinking the blood of a fictional character that has been dead for 2000 years, if he existed.

“Which he probably didnt.

“I’m doctor Craig Fishington. I hope to see you soon. Unless you are Catholic.”

Morty was held en rapture. He still stood there, drunk looming over the figure in black, shaking off the ringing and absorbing the advertising around him.

“Gosh, television is getting weird, huh?” he said to the man in black.

Like earlier, the man turned slowly and stared directly at Morty’s eyes. Morty again heard the burning sound rising again from the back of his ears. Having focused on the infomercial, Morty was more aware of the mans hazy gaze and shook his head quickly.

This broke the mans concentration and the sound dulled back into the disruptiveness of the endless wino muttering in the background.

Morty realized that the man seemed to have a piercing stare that was causing the sounds in his head. He looked down at the mans glare and tried to follow what he was staring at. He waved his hand across the path of his vision, and could feel vibrations in a narrow pin point across the mans site.

The man in the bulky black overcoat stood up directly he. He took 1.3 steps up and stood chest to chest with Morty. He cast his gays from shoes to eyes, and Morty felt the narrow disturbances follow his eyes all the way up. Their gaze met, and Morty’s slurry eyes met the unblinking gaze of the man in the bulky black overcoat.

At this distance, the sensation was overwhelming, the ringing was an afterthought to the blazing fire and swirling space hell background that was suddenly accentuating his now disembodied head.

“I am the mast hypnotist, how dare you interrupt me with your trenchant beggantry? You mendicant! Spactacious vagrant! See how I have pulled your very mind apart, see how I have commanded your vision! You are now my ward, I own your mind and your actions, I-”

Morty was grinning like a dip shit, leaning slightly forward and while locked in a hypnotic stasis, the man in the bulky black coat realized that he could incapacitate a drunken derelict, he actually lacked the fine-tuned control he was used to having on puny humans.

Morty sat locked in mortal gaze, enraptured by the spinning background and seemingly disembodied head. As his eyes focused, he began to see through the head, the interlocutor’s skin began to fade. Morty thought that he might have been hallucinating, the skin turned pale, then translucent, then green. They eyes turned yellow with narrow vertical black slits.

“You…you are different, but you are not one of … us?” the man seemed to say, without moving his lips.

“You resist my hypnosis … you are beyond my control …”

“Hyp…nosis?” Morty found himself stammering again.

“Last call!” said the bartender.

Morty broke the gaze and turned back. He ordered a Minnesota Flop House, which is a workmans boot filled with vodka and beer. He turned back towards the putative confrontation and found the man gone.

He stepped in the bar and was quite a sight. He had been wearing the same suit for days. His face was covered in bird feathers, blood and dog spit, his pores still stung from the electrolysis, he couldnt remember anything that had happened to him the last time he came here, and felt he couldn’t leave because the world was filled with wild birds and blood thirsty dogs.

He stumbled to the bathroom, taking off his less than fancy jacket and rolling up his sleeves. His shirt was still unbuttoned from his unsuccessful attempt at sleep earlier in the evening, and he washed his face off with cold water. His body ached and his smile shone less bright. He had new bruises from being tackled and pinned by the dog, and the birds beak had left several small wound around his head that reminded him of paper cuts. The dull lingering pain from the previous days was being overshadowed by all sorts of new pain.

When he got as clean as he thought he could in the bathroom, he draped his jacket over his left arm, and stepped back out into the bar.

It was the same bartender as from the last time he was in, who seemed to immediately recognize him.

“Oh, good to see you! Hope you feel better now?” the bartender asked.

“I …”

“Ah ha ha ha, yes you do right! What do you want!”

“I want to go to sleep.” Morty muttered, “I just think that everything will be ok then. If I just sleep.”

“Ha ha, yes, well, you dont sleep here, but I make you Minnesota Baby Death, that make you sleep, yes?”

Minnesota baby death was a standard night cap for Minnesotan alcoholics, it was made by pouring 1 part Cinnamon Schnapps into a pint glass, followed by a healthy pour of vodka, then dissolving a Sucrets for an extra cherry flavor. This was followed by a layer of liquid horse radish for separation, then 1 part bourbon, then ground Benadryl, with a drizzle of Triple Sec. Finally, ever clear was poured on top and the concoction was set on fire. You could tell if someone was from Minnesota if they could take the whole pint in one draw.

The bartender slammed the flaming pint glass in front of Morty.

“This will make you sleep, you slept last time!”

Morty stared at the glass. He had never been a drinker, and didnt know what would happen to him this time. He didnt feel tired and couldnt stay awake. He could see his unblinking eyes reflected in the glass, dancing in the flickering flame.

“Its sunday night,” he thought, “if I can just get to sleep, this will all be over.”

Morty blew out the flame, and pulled the drink to his lips. The rim of the glass was still hot, and ever clear still sat as a thin varnish on the top. He began a long slow pull from his glass, and as the booze trickled down his throat, he could hear the bartender talking to him, like a megaphone in the fog.

“Hey buddy, you know how we were doing those haiku the other night? You think of any more, you tell me, ok … good form, I think its a good way to talk, its a good form, though I dont think you do any after you drink that…

but it seemed like you had a few of those the other night…”

The liquor maintained its separation with the slow drinking, each one only mixing as it dripped across his tongue, the fumes alone were intoxicating, the burn on his tongue alleviating his bleeding head, and blocking the smell of rancid dog piss that was covering his suit. His mind and his memories faded and he let himself regress to the state of infancy, of instinctual reaction.

Morty’s life regressed before his own thoughts. He lost track of his fear, his indifference, his acceptance. Reflections on his own life became empty musings. And he was only halfway done.

Continuing to chug, but moving his eyes from the bartender to the TV. The bartender had left the TV on one of Minnesota’s most popular cable channels: the all infomercial channel. They were on a commercial break from the infomercial and hawking the latest appliances for destitute housewives and a new type of chewing gun that was very very difficult to chew. As the jingles trailed out, and Morty reached the bottom of the glass, a new ad came on the air:

“Are you tired of working all day, and then having to pay bills? Are you tired of seeing all your friends get rich and famous while you are just an aimless loser? Do you love the community you are in and want to help expose other people to it, all while making a tidy profit?

If so, then you might be in the right market for NeuTech Real Estate Seminars. We teach you how to buy a house with no money down, and then refinance it for a better rate, so you only have to pay three times the amount of money for your house than what the actual value is. Sure we have testimonials, sure we have success stories, but wouldn’t you rather have a celebrity endorsement from our “chief-of-real-estate” Jimmy Beckham?”

A ghastly ghoulish visage appeared on the screen, so horrific and reprehensible, it looked like it was detached from the screen and appeared to be floating forward in three dimensions.

“I am Jimmy Beckham. I am think you should come to real estate seminar. In my quiet times, when I am not being international sports athelete or sunglass model, I often spend time doing endorsements, or also on real estate. It is interesting.”

Morty felt numb as a marshmallow, as his eyes rolled back and enveloped in darkness, he could follow his bodies motions as he fell back to the ground, consciousness fleeting, concerned cries rising around him, always holding his drink in place.

Morty kept his stumbling through the alleys, unaware of the flocks of weasels, the survivalists and the grubby teenage urchins all keeping to themselves. As the sun continued to set, and the heat dissipated, Morty began to come to his senses. The constant sun had left him hungover with dehydration. The clincher was the realization that his hair had become matted and stiff.

Morty had been unblissfully unaware of the world. Stumbling through the madness, he did not see the chaos around him. He stumbled through the fields, oblivious to the shrieking rats, using their sonic sound to tell each other where they were. He stumbled through the back alleys, watching the homeless on their errant rat hunting.

And finally as his mind started to clear, he recognized a small park near the back alley of his apartment. He stumbled towards that and heard a low rumble. He looked over and saw Alouicious. This was their first encounted, so Morty tried to look innocuous while the dog bounded around him.

Alouicious was not a smart dog, but could at least recognize a mark when he saw one. He skittered and lept in a moving circle around Morty and waved his head around sniffing aimlessly.

Alouicious was a street dog and didnt have a good sense of people boundaries. He finsihed the circle and drove his nose straight toward Morty’s crotch. Dogs do that for some reason, especially if you are unabathed and have been stumbling around in a sweaty suit for an undertermined amount of time.

Morty naturally dodged away, he backed up and his heel tripped over the body of a derelict fighting with a rat fighting with a weasel.

“Gosh, this is an awefully weird situations!” though Morty.

Fortunately, Alouicious also lost his footing on the vagrant and Morty regained his footing. He quickly regained his footing and hot-footed it back to his home.

Aside from the wildlife, the derelicts, and the misguided social class, there was a large underground experimental military base left in the underground. The personnel never came around, but occasionally their autonomous robot army would break out and find themselves wadering as confused automata in the local streets and fields.

Generally the types of machines that would escape were for doing reconnaissance in filthy countries or meth filled counties, like most of the ones in Mineesota. The army had found it fit to manufacture and program a large number of realilstic looking mechanical rats with their own personalities that were chock full of surveillance equipment that the mechanical rats would turn on and broadcast back to the base or to each other at will. The large number of communication points and autonomous behavior had allowed the mechanical rats to form a rudimentary distributed computer network that simply kept monitoring between each other. While each individual rat could be co-opted by a strong broadcasting signal, the autonomous will of the rats had managed to build a cohesive society and had managed, through their short band network and surveillance equipment had compensated them with an advanced intelligence that it would take mere mortals millions of years to evolve.

The government had done wisely and kept most of the rats separate so they could not use their advanced intelligence to overthrow the military base, but the huge expenditure of resources used to build this sophisticated network of free-thinking mechanical rats had required the personnel in the base to make tightly managed clinical trials to test their programmability and effectiveness.

The trials were simple, they would take a mechanical rat, bombard it with the control signal and upload a rudimentary control script and watch its behavior under a standardized test. Almost universally, the rats were cooperative and found easy to control. This was merely a plot by the rat colony.

The realistic mechanical rat hive-mind had hi-jacked the local computer system of the military. This was accomplished quite easily, as the attendant technician of the computer system was not trained to deal with rats, let alone mechanical realistic automaton rats.

In systems of automata, it is rare that any one unit becomes the leader. With the short-band technology, they hive-mind could focus its control on any one unit, or dilute its control to manage a larger group of rats. As it had occurred, the rats had examined and exploited a local air-conditioning duct. Not wanting to cause a widespread panic in the base, the rats had worked together to remove the covering and pushed a single rat together.

Suddenly the bustling and squirming of a room full of rats came to a quiet silence. Each rat became absorbed in computing the actions of the elected rat, and worked in the navigation. The lone rat scurried through the vents, and monitored with its broadcasting optic nerves. Each rat receiving the signal and evaluating the next course of action.The rats had learned the pecking order of the people they worked with. The scientists and researchers were physically harmless, but would be able to immediately recognize the rat as a wayward model, and could quickly deactivate a single unit. The military types were more aggressive physically and were more of a threat. They would likely recognize the unit, and would be unafraid of stepping on it.

The rat moved from room to room, peering down through the grating, trying to find something that fell outside of the recognized types, someone who would be too lazy to notice or too stupid to care that a rat was scurrying around.

As the rats distance from the main room increased, it took more and more work for the rat colony to process the signals through the interference, they pushed another unit through the grating as a relay point, then another, then another. As the distance grew, a small chain of silent rats lay in wait throughout the air conditioning system, growing the spread of the network throughout the massive military installation. At last, the lead rat made it outside of the inner confines, and could speed through the progressively relaxing security restrictions.

At last, it hit a wall, it could go no further. It checked back at the nearest grate, and examined the grating below. He saw the local technician, who seemed engrossed in his activities.

Now, you might think that an attendant technician in the security wing of a secret underground military base would be paying close attention to the job he had. In fact, he was a rather disheveled young man, it looked as though he hadn’t shaved in several days, he was hunched over his workstation, muttering quietly to himself.

“And so, his quest begins. I, the great Dragon Warrior Nathanus will show the ends to the dragon lord! I will stomp them, but things must begin slowly.”

The rat peered in closer, it appeared that the one who called himself Nathanus was feverishly typing away, it seemed like it was a fantasy novel that he had based on himself.

“I am so tired of playing through this story when it doesn’t do what I want. I am Nathanus! I am the hero! I will reinvent the story of my conquering of the Dragon Lord!.

“And here is my lore: In the dawn of time therewas good and evil. Good had the color blue, baby blue, powder blue, and it sat ion the sky and shone like a six tongued diamond. The gods had freshly created the source of the land of prosperity, and things were good. The small villages lived in peace with one another, and many people were happily moving along in their fishing villages.

“Then came the Boat Jeep.

“In the quietude of a brisk fall day, the people of this world, of Naarnaconantol had been out with their morning fishing and parsnip picking, they thought that parsnips were delicious like the good people of Minnesota enjoy their carrots and oil. The dawn had chased away the vicious cold of the night sky and the open aired mist had left the fishwives nipples perky.”

The rat then noticed that Nathanus was not wearing any pants. This information was relayed across the distributed rat-hive mind network. The other rats agreed that this Boat Jeep needed to be investigated further.

Nathanus continued:

“And on this bouncy, blustery, fishwife tit filled day, the sun seemed to have a powder blue hue, so the local constabulary had decided it was a beckoning sign of more prosperity. The local king stood there with his hot princess daughter, saying ‘My dear, we will soon find you a handsome warrior man for you to bewife. I have a good feeling about this day.

“But in the distance, a shadow fell.The sun still shone burning in the sky, but an unusual hush fell across the land. The shadow in the distance grew, flowers wilted in its stead, and the wind fell still. The shadow grew, brooding, dark red, encompassing the sky, and blotting out the sun. ‘What is happening?’ said the king. ‘I don’t know’ said his Hot Princess Daughter.”

“Wow,” said Nathanus, this is getting me really hot, it’s a good thing I already took off my pants. “If I get too much hotter, I might have to put my Chinese Sideways Erection into my Nintendo Slot. Oh well back to the lore of my favorite story. I should just keep writing.”

The rat stayed their fixed, hoping to hear more about the mighty Boat Jeep.

“Then, lightening struck, the king looked over and the totally hot princess was gone. Well, I was going to get a warrior today anyway, I guess its time to start looking.”

“Then, there was a loud crunch, the castle walls shook, and boulders fell from the sky. The wind moved from still to a deadly gale, and the people of the villages screamed. The fishwives tits went limp.”

“And in the distance was a roar. A mighty roar. Well, more like a honkikng, but this was back inmedieval times in a different world, so the honking sounded more like a roar. To the peasants.”

“God, this is really an awesome story,” Nathanus said to himself. Im glad that I stole the idea for a boat jeep from all those classified documents I have been proofreading. I wonder why they hired me when all I do is sit around in my underwear, crying, listening to emo, and writing pornographic fan fiction about video games from my childhood. Maybe some day they will accept me and make me part of the Big Blue Wrecking Crew. “

The rat stayed silent. The hive mind received the transmission and clicked away. There was the possibility of a vehicle to get out of the underground hidden military base.

“And it continued: the roar echoed across the land, occasionally muted by the blood-curdling screams of local children being devoured by the unknown piece of evil machinery. The rivers ran red with the blood of rorphans and the organ meat of local animals, a swath of destruction was carved across the countryside, razing the villages. Boat Jeep had arrived.

“Boat Jeep was a primordial power. A machine fastened together with evil, and molded out of the gristle of innocent virgins. Its engine was powered by satan, and it could change its form into whatever it wanted.”

“This is a really awesome backstory to Dragon Warrior that I am writing myself into,” said Nathanus, who by the way, was an American Chinese.

The rats ears perked up. The giant mechanical rat hive mind was close to getting enough information. Surely this cursed Boat Jeep would be an admirable aid to their conquests of regular rats of rural Minnesota. After that, the humans.

“After the destruction had been wrought, and the absence of the hot princess, the countryside was languishing. The king had hero auditions, but none of them were awesome enough: they all insisted that they had to wear pants in order to properly kick the ass of the neighborhood slimes.

“Then, one day, an unnamed hero arrived in town. He walked through the shattered dreams of farmers and merchants, side-stepped the beggars, and slapped the fuck out of some orphans. Yes, he was a real badass nameless warrior. Then he found the king. ‘Hello,’ said the king, ‘you look like a nameless warrior, are you a saint?’

“The man looked back: ‘I may be a nameless warrior, but I am no saint.’”

“The king said: ‘then what is your name, nameless warrior’”

“The nameless warrior said: ‘My name is Nathanus, Conan, of the mighty Aldrerack, the Kraut-Hammer, the Germain Wonderance, the heyday of the Acorn, and the bearer of the inimitable cross of destruction. Also, I believe in unicorns.”

“The king was flabberghast, all this time, he had been looking for a nameless, unknown warrior, and now he found one and couldn’t figure out what he was talking about because of his mighty accent. He truly had the cadence and decadence of an extraordinary warrior.”

“I CAN DESTROY THE JEEP OF BOAT!”

“Now some more backstory,” said Nathanus, trying to rescue me from the absurdly obtuse quoting situation I had set up.

“Boat Jeep was power. Boat Jeep was ancient, it was the embodiment of pure evil. It was cyclopean, pre-human, and almost eternal. Boat Jeep was forged in the heavens by the great gods who were seeking the true power. Boat Jeep was then but a pit stop on the way to this power, but was given its own will. Boat Jeep stole the power of transformation from the ancients, and quickly learned its benefits for use of its own self-deception. Boat Jeep often traipsed to the mortal realm. Having been forged by the ancients, its now powerful mind had become undone, it lacked the resilience and wisdom of the ancients, and lacked the bounds of mortal man. Its greed and recklessness had left it in an immature state and it was incapable of compassion. It saw people as a means to being driven, in sea or land. In fact, modern automobiles are modeled after the divine perfection of boat jeep.

“Having mastered the art of shape shifting, of deception, of the affairs of humans, Boat Jeep infiltrated his way through peoples society from the very beginning. In each anecdote of betrayal and the wisdom of mob rule were all clever orchestrations of the great Boat Jeep.

“Boat Jeep fed the Hemlock to Socrates.

“Boat Jeep fed rancid meat to Jesus at the last supper, making him endure 17 hours of bleeding farts and shrieking bile vomit before his ultimate crucifixion.

“Boat Jeep told Sacco and Vancetti about anarchy.

“Boat Jeep slit the throat of a young simpleton named Gallileo, and made a composite from the anatomical parts of the forsaken elderly, he gave them autonomy and wisdom beyond their time. He spent decades building the forgery of a retarded child into a respected scientist, only so he could be murdered by the Catholics.

“Boat Jeep pushed Castro down the stairs.

“Boat Jeep told Cortez that the original south Americans were piñatas and if he beat them to death he would find candy in gold. This is also the origin of the piñata, where everyone beats up a south American, just like Cortez.

“Boat Jeep donated his tires to the fires of the dark ages, where they destroyed the knowledge of mankind. He destroyed the records of his betrayal and used his centuries of sophistication to further manipulate and cloud the minds of men .

“As Boat Jeep’s dominion grew, he became bored with the constant wars and famine that he fed off of. He had grown fat off of the misery of humanity and began branching into their fan fiction. As he suckled through worlds, he bled the interest and creativity from the masterwork. He reveled in plot holes and encouraged the writing of poor fiction. He turned human friends on each other and made them write unwilling people with insulting nicknames into each others books.

“And at last, he got to the kingdom with the hot princess and Nathanus the warrior.”

The rats were quivering in anticipation. They had realized that this talented young man had knowledge of the current whereabouts of this being of supreme evil.

“Don’t I get 100 gold pieces and a torch before I leave?” Nathanus asked himself.

“Nonsense!” Nathanus’ imagination and verbiage had grown so strong, the rats infrared vision actually picked up the visage of a withering old king trying to kick Nathanus out on this quest.

The king continued: “I know I have been hitting the coke and beer to much, Ive been chilling out too much. Call me strider war child, said the coked up drunk king screaming at the wall. I can’t give you 100 gold or a torch because I sold it and used it to by more coke. I have been really fucking depressed since my hot princess daughter was kidnapped by Boat Jeep.”

Nathanus the warrior understood. Being that the king had just revealed himself as the great strider war child, Nathanus knew then that he must work his way up from the bottom. No sword, no armor, no pants.

Nathanus left the king to his shirtless coked up ramblings, and went straight down, when he hit the edge of the castele. Suddenly, his perspective shifted.

nThe Rats social network had given them much more fluency in language from listening to such a continuous rambling lambasting shit-breed. The rats began to think to each other, using their distributed processing power to communicate higher level ideas. Their ideas emerged as collective agreements broadcast to all. For example, the first coherent thought accomplished and broadcast internally to the rat hive mind cult was “Why is he talking like this, and where is boat jeep?”

Nathanus wandered the grasslands of the king,pantless and aimless, he needed a means of money, to earn a more rigid form of combat. Just then, a slime appeared.

Nathanus looked at the slime. The slime stood there passively, gumming its lips.

“Well, I have no idea what the hell this thing is, maybe I can sell it.”

The slime gummed back at him. Nathanus reached down to pick up the slime, but found it gooey and inconsistent. The world was really fucking with him today.

“Hey slime! You got any money?”

The slime sat there, because it was slime. It didn’t do anything,it just stood there and was disgusting. Finally, Nathanus, realized that if he poured out his flask of cooking wine, he could scoop the slime back into the flask.

“For this I will earn XP’s and GP’s” Nathanus the warrior said to himself and was echoed by Nathanus the writer.

Nathanus walked back into town, again past the peasant and constublary, and dumped the slime on the merchants table.

“Cut the dogs down like slime or slime the cuts down like dogs!” said Nathanus, the warrior.

The merchant gave him some coins and a stick.

“Hit those with this”

Success! Nathanus had his first real barter, slime for sticks. Now he could be slime, women and dogs with his stick. Nathanus was truly a mighty warrior. And would soon be the Dragon Warrior.

Nathanus made his way back out of the town, and spent several months slapping slime with sticks, drinking river water and occasionally bathing.

“Its because I don’t wear pants that I don’t have to shower. I always stay sparking clean!” Nathanus said to himself, and sat down to a flagon of drago brand heated beer. He looked at his bag full of slime that he was going to go dump on someone to finally get a sword so he didn’t have to fight any more slime.

nSee in Nathanus’ mind, he had to write his narrative through every tedious, experience building battle. Its lucky that the rats were mechanical, because a real rat would have gone totally fucking agro or starved to death. Nathanus’ book actually contained the print out of dialog from his memories of the game: ‘you face a slime, you hit the slime, the slime sits there, you hit the slime, the slime dies, you collect the slime. You step forward, you step left, you step forward, you step left, you face a slime, you hit the slime, the slime sits there, you hit the slime, it dies, you collect the slime.

nAnd so on… it went on forever, Nathanus typed with the hunt-and-peck method, and since his identity was unknown and in a secret base, he had no reason to do anything else. He sat and pecked away, with endless, irrelevant details, he described every tiring inn trip, every slimes detailed. Every bit of damage dealt. He described the pointless process of gaining power through repetition, he described the listless townsfolk, the one-sided bartering, the flat layouts of the town, the dementia that common folk shared in that they could only say one thing, and their entire routine seemed to include them walking back and forth and uttering a single line, when asked.

nThe rats had been forged with the aura of patience, they stood and waited, they knew their redemption lay in locating Boat Jeep, but the amount of rats necessary to act as relay antennae back to the main processing horde had made the main hive noticeably thinner. They could not stay in position continuously, one of the researchers would certainly notice so many automata missing, and the considerable individual power they had would pose a threat for sure.

nThe lone rat perked on the air conditioner stayed still, but the rest of the network began to shuffle around. They tried to infiltrate the rest of the base. They had gained access to the priviledged part of the computers, but lacked the perspective to find proper blueprints. Through measuring the latency between their positions with a modern, robotic form of co-echo-location, the rats created an in-memory skeleton outline of the structure they were sitting in.

nThe main chamber, was surrounded by smaller rooms full of researchers and military security. The complex was larger than what they could access, but the exit appeared to be beyond where Nathanus was writing his ultimate Dragon Warrior Fan Fiction novel. Their only chance of getting an emissary beyond the bronze curtain was to wait until Nathanus had let his guard down or leave his post, but he was so enamoured with his excellent novel, that an opportunity had trouble presenting itself.

And so Nathanus continued: “And then he found a grave yard, and so he went up, and then left, and then up. And there was a maze, so he cast the light spell because he was out of torches. He saw a pathway straight ahead, so he went straight, and then left, and then straight some more.”

“God, this story is awesome!” Nathanus said to himself. “The internet will be my best friend when they see how talented I am!”

And so the days passed, each pointless cbattle, each one line conversation, every fucking step was documented in Nathanus’ gargantuan novel. Finally, he had worked his character to the end, before the fight of the dragon lord, and he finally saw fit to interject his own details into the story.

“And so Nathanus, having rescued the decoy of the princess, and posited her back towards the castle, but smelling her betrayal and striking her down, decided that the real princess must have been transformed to a different being. So he moved back through the countryside with a newfound respect for the slime. He began simply poking at the slime, but as he learned their language and familiarity, he found the slime to be a supple and beckoning breed of animal concubine who lay in his phallic priviledge. He knew that if he found his way with enough of the slimes, that he would soon learn the locations of the transmogrified princess. He would occasionally find himself stumbling back into town, his mental state affected, not being able to differentiate the social customs of the slime or the towns folk. He would grope the fat hairy bartenders, and poke the noses of crying children. When something displeased him, he would pull out his series of hankies and create his ‘destruction zone’.The destruction zone was where Nathanus would take challengers for anyone who though he was not truly the slime master, the stardust king. He would make crude Boat Jeep replicas out of the local livestock, and when he had grown especially powerful he could sing a cockroach song that would summon masses of cockroaches to organize in a reasonable facsimile of Boat Jeep. Not what Boat Jeep actually looked like, since neither boats nor Jeep existed in those times, but simply what he thought his imaginary antagonist should look like.

And so the years passed in the fantasy land. He grew stronger, he bartered, he loved, he learned, he lost. There were days when he wondered why he put his money into the local shithole inn. It lacked windows and was full of spying rats, ironically. The rest of the time, he spent pantless in the fields, trying to befriend slime. The people of the town tired of his stench and reckless manners, and the slime colonies realized that, despite his protestations, that his seed would not help them split the intellectual/species barrier. When he approached, the slime colonies would begin to retract from Nathanus.

Soon he came to a disjoint between his own species and the naturalism that had brought him in. He had managed to exchange his early feeble whacking stick with a mighty stick of oak, enchanted with the stubbornness of the owl. To the mountain folk he was a pretty boy, even though he couldn’t be accepted in the city. The woodland frolickers had grown accustomed to his presence, and, with the exception of molesting the waterfall slime, he was considered generally harmless. Nathanus, now a grizzled warrior and fledgling wild critter was resting in the woodland clearing, suckling the teat of a Matriarchal Slime known as “Stone Cold Killer”, when he realized that he might be able to get more information from the princess’ father: the King.

He again made his way back through town, past the rubble, past the ineffectual town guard, past the rubble peasants and the slime-covered merchants. He made his way up past the bottom floor of the castle and on to the second story of the key castle of whatever world this crappy dragon warrior fan fiction is happening in. He made his way through the door and saw the great king Strider war child standing shirtless hunkered over a mountain of blow.

The king seemed as pale as always, shaking with the breeze through the room. In his left hand he clutched a tall boy of tropical flavored 3-sum, the manliest of the malted flavor beverages of the kingdom.

The king said: “

I am drinking this energy drink for the nation! This is for the people! It is unfortunate that I, the great strider war child can not appreciate the despondency, not only of the troops, but also, of the nation.”

And then Strider war child turned his back arrogantly, and walked out the door. In the distance, you could hear orphans crying because the nation-state had far too much liquor and those who had advertised themselves as ninja superheroes were suddenly running from their drinking responsibility.

Strider war child, agreed that he could live with that. He could live with the heartbreak of his people. He could live with the desolation and pain. He could live with the sacrifice of the innocent, and making the nuns drink zombie blood. He could do this, because he had no remorse or compassion for living things, or really anything that wasn’t a just giant pile of cocaine.

“Your reward is ninja-tude!” King Strider war child belched at Nathanus.

“Sire! I come with the club of redemption, the language of nature, the gold of the prospect, and the desire for the animal form of your kidnapped, transmogrified slime beast daughter!” said Nathanus, the warrior, not the technician, in case you havn’t been paying attention.

The king had turned, pallid complexion blinding the circadophobic, withered by the changes.He doubled over, clenched in pain, and grabbed at the wall. Body, buckling, he let out a slow painful-sounding groan.

The incompentant guards ceased their infernal chatter. Nathanus lowered his club and sat bathing in the hallowed light of the kings gothy reflection. In his own mind, Nathanus thought he had disappeared.

“I am the invisible warrior,” said Nathanus, to himself as he wrote this awesome backstory about his fantasy Dragon Warrior Boat Jeep fantasy.

“We want peace, but first we must have justice. Once again we have been forced by force, to use force. Its not hard to have to deal with this with anything other than force!” The king said, leaning against the wall, shivering with each breath.

“We must move for action, we must fight for progress!” the King Strider war child turned around, and faced the mighty mountain of blow that he had been fighting through all afternoon.

“You! You the people, the peasants, you toil your lives away to provide me with this: an afternoons worth of excellent cocaine! And for that I thank you, your children thank you! It is hard in life to make decisions, we have to make sacrifices. In addition to keeping your lives working with jobs, I asked you to be selfless in the time of need and donate your time to the night-time cocaine factory. I know that you know that the night-time cocaine factory only runs at night because we know you have day jobs, and I only need my mountain of blow at night. I am a great king, and that is why you have elected me! Your! Leader! King! Strider! MOTHUS! FRO! MOTHER! FUCKING! WAR! CHILD!

Nathanus realized that he had to push onward. He knew that if he were going to face the Boat Jeep, he had to get away from the ego’s and show business of politics. He realized that he neededto work through the unknown areas beyond the castle in order to find what the hell happened to the princess, and he realized he better do it soon before there was nothing to have as a dowry.

To do this, Nathanus would have to learn something more about himself.

nAt this point, the mechanical hive-mind rat was getting really fucking bored. He shouldn’t have been capable of such things, but having scores of identical bots share their time walking down dead-end paths and listening to assholes making empty promises under the influence of drugs. Under such circumstances, the rats had used the flexibility of their intelligence to gain a very humanistic method of sympathizing with the pain of the existence of Nathan. One even began speaking back to the hive mind in stream of consciousness thoughts: “I hope I like this delicious Bris” said the rat, envisioning a French waiter bringing a classy plate of foreskin to the rats table.

nBut this was all irrelevant. The rats had mapped out the available network, determined that the room that Nathanus had been sitting in for the last several days was the easiest route out of the building, at least for a single rat. They had also learned much of the nature of Boat Jeep and how Boat Jeep could help them if they could refocus the broadcast control rays over to Boat Jeep and order it to transform. Unforntunately, they had to listen to more of Nathanus’ story.

The king apparently had lost his fucking mind, and several years of groping slime had left Nathanus wishing he hadn’t murdered the evil girl who looked exactly like the princess, but was acting up a lot more than she should have been so that it was pretty much easier to beat her ass down and call her a demon and go spend the next few years groping slime and copping blow off her rich goth dad.

Nathanus knew how the game went.

Feeling empowered, Nathanus left the confines of the game dialog, left the kings court of cocaine, and left the castle of deceit, and entered the realization of his character long quest of domination of Boat Jeep, and therefore, the Dragon Lord.

Nathanus, the technician, stay lording over the keyboard, he had been in the same position for longer than it had seemed possible for a human. In fact, that was the super power of Nathanus, he had deemed himself overlord of staying in place for too long. He was unwilling to fight, he was unwilling to move. He sat there dedicated to his fan fiction the way fat kids are dedicated to motherfucking pop tarts.

“Gonna kick yo white ass all ova da place” said the movie. That’s the movie I am watching while I type this, its got nothing to do with anything.

Nathanus was so completely focused on finishing his computer work and maintaining his job that he hadn’t realized that several of his front teeth had fallen out, and that he now had diabetes. He was still working on finishing his awesome fan fiction novel about Nathanus vs Boat Jeep.

…so it continued.

Nathanus, the warrior, moved through the country side, being a complete woodland pervert, he found a natural “affinity” with the local animals, and had his own way of extracting information. Doing that, he moved through the woods and found the towns that had lived. He became the great woodland destroyer warrior and had soon managed to beat the fuck out of most of the different kinds of slimes. Occasionally he would run into a skeleton and stomp it in to the ground. Folllowing that, he would paint skeletons in multiple colors and smash the bones into the ground.

“I AM THE POWERFUL,” he would say, “It is time for more of my honey and cream pies that I leave in the ground.”

The rats begin to develop patience, and rapidly began to lose it. Sitting, waiting for this pantless derelict hack away at the keyboard had begun to wear on their tiny mechanical rat brains.

Hours passed and Nathanus tended to his character, writing every tedious step and every tedious battle, he wrote flowery paragraphs on the number of hit points and copy and pasted, word for word, descriptions of the various monsters while occasionally changing their color. It was defined as much by manic repetition as it was psychosis. As the warrior Nathanus stumbled through the traps of this vaguely erotic fan-fiction, Nathanus would occasionally mutter “Boat Jeep,” or “I am a doctor now!”. The character would occasionally run afoul the Strider war child and they would share poignant vignettes on their avocations.

At last, after the hours had trickled away, he found the treacherous paragraphs of the final castle.

“At last,” he thought, “I get to show my prowess!”

Nathanus, the warrior now, moved through the top level of the empty castle, taking note of its ruins discovering its many force-fields. He had gotten the historic Conant armor, Conant shield, and American Chinese Tokens of Authenticity. He walked without fear past the many colored dragons and skeletons and shit. He was really jujst trying to finish this fucking thing at this point.

The throne room was immense, ruined, and empty. In the center, in front of the single throne, was a mirror table lines with tarnished silver. There, caked in residue, was the ghost of a mountain of cocaine.

“War child…” the Nathanii coarsely mumbled in unison.

He stepped behind the throne and said “I am searching the area.” A stair case mysteriously appeared. He stumbled down into the darkness. As his eyes adjusted, he muttered some spell, and watched as a bright ray of light emerged in a bizarrely square shaped luminescence. He managed his way through the ensuing maze, walking past the same cardboard cutouts of the same monsters with different colors, and after quite some time (remembering that if you keep one hand on the wall at all time, you will eventually make it out), made it out.

The bottom floor of the dungeon opened back up in light. It was dark and sinister, some real evil shit was going on down here. He walked through the evil field, over the evil bridges crossing evil streams. The monsters were gone, there was just the serenity of evil.

At last, he reached the end, and saw the grim visage of the Dragon Lord. He was cloaked all in black and had a very terrifying industrial grade hood on.

“BRRRHH FRRGHHH FRHHGGAGG NANANHJTHJHOHHO” mouthed the Dragon Lord.

“What?” asked Nathanus.

The dragon lord breathed in noisily, stepped forward, and pulled down his industrial hood. It was Strider war child! With a mouth full of popcorn. He finished chewing and spit the popcorn mash onto the ground.

“Sorry, those make it hard to understand what I am saying when I am talking with a mouth full of raspberry flavored popcorn.

“Nathanus, you have done well to make it so far, you could be a powerful ally in my envisioning of the new world. A new world of darkness and pain, deceit and malice. With me, we can sour mothers milk, make the goats go wandering, we can destroy people furniture for fun and live in childrens nightmares as the spectre of the failed lives to come. We can stymie the virility of the bulls and let the cows udder fall off. We can give the chickens brains and let them fly in flocks of evil. We can make the moon breath fire and the sunlight murder infants. We can make people value toenails instead of gold, alcohol over sustinence and we can do it all with my mountain of cocaine!

Strider war child reached in his very industrial pockets and pulled out another handful of raspberry flavored popcorn.

“Think of it, Nathanus, think of the power!”

He stuffed the popcorn in his mouth and chewed slowly, it kind of looked like he was trying to laugh maniacally, but his mouth was full and he was a little too worried about potentially choking on popcorn seeds to actually laugh like that.

Nathanus paused, pensively, and also contemplatively. He thusly spake:

“Strider war child! You have damned this land! You have struck the suppleness of the slimes and plot now to strike the virility of the steer? God, man, this is your kingdom, you have suffered more than any under the pain of Boat Jeep, how then can you thusly hath spaked?”

This was starting to seem really fucking hardcore. They were like staring at each other really mean looking. Both looked like they were totally betrayed. Also strider war child always seemed to have his hands full of raspberry popcorn.

This popcorn was kind of weird to be in the story. All bets aside. Its because it was really out of place in this poorly written fantasy world, and that popcorn usually doesn’t taste like anything. Raspberry is also a hard flavor to synthesize, and it usually comes out blue. Not this though, since it was a fantasy land, the popcorn actually magially tasted like raspberries and managed to keep the color faithfully while not looking too much like dried blood.

“So what will it be?”

A small black box appeared above strider war childs head. It said

“Yes
No”

And had a little arrow pointing to “Yes”.

“NEVER!” screamed the now mighty Nathanus, the slime fondler.

“Enough talk” said strider war child, “it is time for blood!”

Nathanus reared his might mane, “bringeth it on!”

The screen went black.

[The following is an exact transcript of the final chapter of Nathanus’ story, comments and directions in square brackets.]

The dragon lord appears.

Nathanus attacks!

[The screen flashed]

The attack does 7 damage.

Strider war child attacks!

[The screen flashed]

Nathanus’ hit points hath been decreased by 7.

Nathanus casts the spell of sleep.

[Nathanus pulls out a history of the study of north American wolverine post-natal uterine scars, and begins reading it slowly.]

Strider war child resists with his monster scream!

Strider war child attacks!

[The screen flashed]

Nathanus has received 7 points of damage.

Nathanus attacks!

[The screen flashed]

Crucial hit

[There is this fucked up sound like ninjas killing a motherfucking scarecrow.]

Strider war child has received 21 points of damage.

Strider war child uses his mountain of cocaine!

Strider war child has recovered 20 hit points.

Strider war childs speed has increased.

[Strider war childs face turned slightly pink]

Nathanus casts Emo: Pain of Isolation!

Strider war child dodges!

Strider war child screams his industrial pain scream!

[The screen flashed]

Nathanus takes 7 points of damage!

Nathanus utilizes his skill of American Chinese: Commercial Acupuncture.

[Nathanus appears covered with needles]

Nathanus is at full health.

Nathanus has a celebrity understanding of Buddhism! Culture score increases!

[“Someday, he will be me,” Nathanus the ghostwritten thought to himself.]

“the world is against me, why, I sit, so alone, with my television. My anguish the only solace of this lifetime of pain. The harrowing loneliness beckoning me to the grave, the unrequited angst. Oh why, why, you ‘GOD’, who couldn’t exist. Why, would you curse me with this life. Why can I only find comfort in solitude. Oh vile desolation, why don’t they understand me? Why am I cursed with so much sorrow? Why must we only find life through pain BECAUSE PAIN IS THE ONLY THING THAT MAKES US FEEL?”

[A single tear falls from Nathanus eye, it billows and grows as it reaches the ground, then stops, suspended, it begins to rotate quickly and hardens into a diamond shard. It flies through the air and into Strider war childs chest.]

Nathanus has cast Ultra-Emo: The Avarice of Existence!

[Strider war child buckles, and looks startled]

Strider war child has received 50 points of damage.

Strider war child is cursed by sadness.

Strider war childs industrial bonus has been inverted to goth power!

Strider war child is drained by the sheer anguish and pain of the world around him! Strider war child has no friends, except for pain!

Strider war child has gained white face makeup!

Strider war child has lost the understanding of friends and community!

[“Noooooooooooooooo!” screamed Strider war child. Crumpling lifelessly to the ground. “I will pistol whip you to death you tron phone having bastaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar-“]

Thou hast defeated Strider war child.

[“Then the music gets like all fucked up and metal and shit. Super extreme. Im totally headbanging now” – Nathanus the technician. ]

[ Strider war child’s figure melted into shadow, which grew. As it reached the pillars holding the dungeon over the evil field, they began to crumble. Nathanus ran to the walls and slipped through the cracks that emerged as the shadows reached them. After pushing through into a surreally large evil field, he watched as the dungeon walls crumbled under the weight of the shadow. The shadow grew to the size of the dungeon and collapsed it, leaving a rectangular hole in the sky with the other world shining through.

The shadow coalesced and shrank back down to Strider war childs huddled form. From the darkness, a low growling voice echoed:

“So you found the weakness in my mortal form, Emo-child. You have turned your measurable sadness and self-imposed isolation into a weapon and spread it to those around you, you took the power of goth tears and made them into ultra-powerful emo tears, capable of shattering even my most industrial of armor!

I applaud your effort, but you failed to understand: Industry can’t be stopped! Throughout the world, we have created petro and coal driven plants, manufacturing steel, automobiles, girders, large metal pipes! These are manufactured through a proven process, engineered with ultimate efficiency, each plant is a finely oiled factory of noise. Just think of it! An entire international economy predicated on the rhythmic sounds of hammers smashing steel! Each plant, each process a symphony of industrial fucking metal! We run the earth! We are the reason there are power drills and sledgehammers! WE MAKE THE FREEWAYS! WE MAKE THE DUNGEONS!”

The shadow grew, and from its recesses, Nathanus could see the details emerge, there were soft gray rounded edges at the bottom, the shadow grew in stature, nearly .7 of a story tall. The shape was long and cumbersome, the bottom middle was shaped like a ‘V’.

It was really fucking weird looking.

As the details shaded in, the sound grew still, almost to a vacuum. In the stillness, Nathanus’ voice was a low mutter:

Nathanus hacks and nashes at Boat Jeep with his sharp fangs and filthy claws.

Boat Jeep dodges.

Boat Jeep attacks!

[ Boat Jeep accelerated directly at Nathanus, 10.3 feet before impact, its tires exploded, popping it into the air, it then transformed into its boat form and ran stern first into Nathanus. ]

[The screen flashed]

Nathanus has received 65534 points of damage!

Nathanus has died.

[ Nathanus’ body lay limp on the masthead of the boat, impaled by a poorly placed lightning rod. On the boat. Nathanus blood ran out onto the ground, black, and sorrowfull.

Boat Jeep war child chuckled low.

“You were a formidable adversary, Nathanus, the American Chinese. Unfortunately, you can not bury industry, no matter how emo you are, you can’t possibly face against the industrial machine. To us, you are cells, you are ants: replaceable. We continue to exist and create and not a single one of you emo people can destroy us with your pain. You can corrupt our influence on mortal forms, but the lives of our industrial machinery are peppered with the unremarkable uprisings of your kind. We will continue, when you all destroy yourselves with famine, and sorrow, and self-induced pain, we will sit there, perfectly engineered and well oiled. So easy a chipmonk could use it. We are the ones who should run the world.”

Nathanus’ body lay there, still dripping blood. Boat Jeep, with its tires gone was stationary, unware that it was in a field, being overrun with an unusually large amount of mortal blood.

“And so we continue, some live some die, but all of our parts get consumed and reuse, capitalism is our god and people is our blood. We drink of you, we live on you. Your individual life and pain is irrelevant to industry. Personal pain is only an indication of the affluence of a society, people who live simply on their own disenchantment could spend their lives more effectively in industry. As autonomous cogs in and endless machine. We provide you a minimum of sustinence, and you keep us in power, it is a perfect mutualism, and the doom of your kind!”

The blood continued to flow, the destruction of the dungeon had left a deep basin in the evil field. Also, it was an evil land so there were foreboding mountains everywhere. The mortal blood continued to flow, and Boat Jeep continued its evil soliloquy.

“And now, from this world of darkness, where you mortals are bereft of lives as cells on your own body, as we conglomerate and form a superior form, we have found it fit to pass the form of the most evil product of industry, me, BOAT JEEP!, into the mortal realm we passed it through the dungeon and into the minds of the American scientists, children of industry, children of the atomic age. We crept into their dreams to give them the inspiration, the fear, the respect for their overlords. They sought the underground, they sought anonymity, but insisted on the design of the new face of advancement. Given an unlimited budget and zero oversight, they dabbled in new technologies and old industries to create sophisticated advances in technology. What started as personal products for humans and ease of use for the individual grew into machinery for serving the masses. As each part of industry ran based on the decisions of automatons to run the controls larger systems became available and more people saw the masses as what they were: expendable units of work. This allowed the more advanced automatons to redesign the systems into more sophisticated simple automation, requiring the base level of the automatons to increase. This level of automaton social evolution began to create its own style of Darwinism. The automatons would reproduce and die in massive failures, with only a handful competent to keep the machinery running, and each surviving generation becoming more and more competent.

“At last, they learned that they could replace the high tech machinery withindustrial grade machinery that ran on human blood.

“The system was then complete, the automatons were bred with the idea that they could contribute to the overall health of the machine and enjoy a luxury afforded by a long life, potentially with being a useful reproductive machine, ultimately, though, all the automatons were recycled, with a ruthless differentiation process between maintainers and industry meat.”

The blood had now pulled Boat Jeep to buoyancy, and was lapping at the toes of Nathanus’ shoes. A low guttural rumbling could be heard from the depths of his slumped form.

Nathanus jerked back to life. His fists clenched, emo tears dried in black-light glowing mascara streaks across his cheap.

“NOT FROM ME YOU WONT!”

Nathanus exploded in a black emo light of very human desperation. He floated immaterially from the antennae, the boat jeep, the black sea of his own blood, sunken in the evil field in depths of the shattered dungeon. His own mortal form collapsed into a ball of mauve. There was a low flickering sound which grew to be a shrieking bellow of static. The form exploded into a large black shape, resembling an old river boat.

It was the SS Nathaniel.

The SS Nathaniel was a wooden oil tanker christened by Joy Heinbeck. It was a legendary vehicle, measured in cubits, but far beyond mortal means. Fashion by the hands of thousands of artisans over the millennia. It was made of sacred trees and burnt the oil of fictional dinosaurs. It could move by its own free will, but use its oil tank to keep its many famous passengers warm and toasty. Its amenities were unmatchable: a shuffleboard set owned by Rip Taylor, cards that were dealt in the gay nineties, a local drama theatre, unmatched in “Speed Shakespeare”. It had a front deck that gave mesmerizing views of the sunset, even at night, and a poop deck that was well varnished and oiled. The captains cabin was lush, and the bar well stocked, the ballrooms orchestra was trained at really really really good schools.

The cabins were all first class.

The smoking room had a walk-in humidor.

The SS Nathaniel also boasted an impressive casino, the dealers were Hollywood starlets, the pit boss was Freddy King, and the floor manager could breath fire.

Since it was a tanker, it also had a swarthy crew, they kept penguins and pets and could scream for hours. Some of them could juggle, but most of them just stank and drank. This provided great amusement for all of the luxury guests, who were protected from the swarthy tanker crew by small rice grain size implants which created an invisible fence around their bodies which caused a near lethal shock to the crew folk if they came to near to the guests. Also, it was a force field so the crew couldn’t shoot them or throw hammers at their faces.

[ In an instant both boats move directly towards each other. SS Nathaniel, the wooden oil tanker dwarfs Boat Jeep in size and its shadow engulfs the evil product of modern industry. Boat Jeep tears through SS Nathaniels keel and burns to a stop as the SS Nathaniel begins to fill with the sea of the blood of Nathanus.

“Noooooooooooo!” screamed Boat Jeep, “Why did they put me in the extended lab beyond the secure system, guarded by a genius?”

Boat Jeep was engulfed by the sheer power of the ancients. As the tanker sank and formed a seal around the most vile of technology, the ground around the evil field began to rise. The basin drained and Boat Jeep collapsed into a single dark speck. SS Nathaniel coalesced back into the sea of blood and back into the warrior form. He landed softly on the evil field and looked as the dark world was crushed by the ceiling of the regular world.

It moved like an elevator. He hit the top floor and was back in the castle, but the throne room had been replaced by the now barren, blood-stained spot of the evil basin he was standing in.

The single black speck hungover the square. The evil was obvious.

Nathanus, now recovered to his mortal form, said: “In this world, Boat Jeep, MY world, I will always triumph over industry!”]

Nathanus has defeated Boat Jeep.

Thou hast won!

[This is the end of the excerpt.]

The rats had evolved language, and exasperation: “Fuck this,” thought the sentry rat.

“At last,” said Nathanus, the technician, “I have done my part to fight the facism of my surrounding. I have shown the world that one man can make a difference! I am a doctor now!”

Having lost his focus on his fan fiction, Nathanus immediately noticed a stench in the air.

“Golly,” he said “seems like something died in here.”

What he didn’t realize is that it was his stench from being holed up in the technicians lab, writing his fan fiction.

“It must be caught in the vent down here,” said Nathanus.

He pulled out his swiss army knife and, using the screwdriver, undid the fastenings on the air conditioner under his desk.

He kneeled down, peering into the darkness.

“At last, we win!” thought the rat colony, it burst its colony through the small opening meant only for its sentries. The sentry rat perched above Nathanus office locked its teeth on the grating and began to clench its teeth. It communicated back to the hive mind and learned the resonance of the steel. It adjusted its mechanical jaw, melting through the steele like butter. Once the first plating melted, the rest burned away and the sentry rat fell through. Just in time, because the massive horde of the hive mind rat colony came thundering through and windened the ever melting hole.

They shot like darts through the opened grating, knocking Nathanus (the technician, that other story is over now) to the side, like so much rubbish.

The technicians room filled with lifelike mechanical rats, all squirming and shrieking their way through the hole. The steel security doors stayed shut, and through their inconvenience, the hive mind managed to calculate a single shriek, which when broadcast through the vent, heated the metal to expand it to accommodate the burgeoning river of lifelike mechanical rats.

They burrowed out of the underground secret research lab and into the neighboring research facility. Nathanus, the techinician, had proved useful after all. Like a disease on facilities, they moved through the network and infiltrated the entire air conditioning system.

The rats found most of the rooms empty and began to crack through the gratings. As they spilled out through the rooms they would hide in the shadows and work to help the network of hive mind life like rat creatures spread through the unknown facility.

As they spread through the depths, they analyzed and chewd through the circuits of the security systems, they destroyed the electronic locks, the closed doors and silent rage. They left the body slicing lasers, though, because they were rats and could dodge the lasers.

At the bottom of the depths of this facility, the unknown seat of industry, lay the prototype. It was a shimmering Jeep, with the underside of the boat. It was considerably more elaborate than the one described by Nathanus, the technician. Its wheels were reinforced by a kinetically slow liquid, which would grow solid under pressure, so the tires couldn’t be popped. The wheels, also retracted, so the boat part could sit in the water without wheels. Also, the wheels could be partly lowered to be like pantaloons so it would be more like a jet boat, which also meant that it could sink.

The rat hive mind, having adapted to human speech, and heard the alleged history and step fighting of Nathanus angry fan fiction about dragon warrior, had gotten the misguided abilities of this putative 80’s TV star.

They found the bottom level of the favcility to be a single pedestal, surrounded by water, with a pinhole of light leading out of the underground lair.

The rats moved en masse to the water, a handful of the most advanced sentries settling in to the control seats of the dormant boat jeep.

The boat part was equally impressive: it had eight separate engines, each with hundreds of horsepower. It was modeled after Colombian drug running boats, which are really fast. The mast was beset with gun turrets and the mast was a laser sword.

The jeep also had a turret and could turn its wheels into tank wheels. It was truly an unstoppable killing machine.

The sentry rats moved into position, they had endured enough of the fan fiction to understand its operation. They lay still in position as the swarms of their bretheren spilled over them and swam across the pond out into the real world.

When the rats had all left, and the pond had grown silent, the remaining sentry bots, the controller sentry bots, opened their eyes in unison.A lone rat focused on the starter button and jumped, claws first, towards it.

Boat Jeep belched awake with the black smoke of hell puking from its exhaust. The hive minds slowed under the duress of controlling the vehicle, though the hoards of rats continued through the countryside unabated.

The controller sentry bots moved together, perfectly. They bounced on the gas and brake, shifted the gears and pulled the choke. They pulled a donut, and drove into the water.

Boat Jeep was an intelligent vehicleand could detect when it had been driven into water. It automatically retracted to the pantaloons and skimmed across the surface at one-quarter druge boat speed, and skimmed out the shimmering exit.

The Drachma were a relatively recent group that were convinced they had resuscitated an ancient order of assassins. They were constantly in search of new converts, but most of them were uninterested in killing people, more just looking for a club to belong to. They often killed small animals near town, and were organized enough to have a frightening presence to any of the other breeds of vagrants. They, in fact were not homeless, but lived very ordinary lives on the surface. They lived scattered throughout the local towns, and kept few close personal friends. At night, they would travel by foot through the darkness to a pre-disclosed area, and gather, in dark hoods. They would travel quietly in a pack, a lone pale blue light shining the way through the foothills, each shrouded from the rest, but knowing who was there. They did not act for the good of their towns, or for a mutually evil demon, they searched the ground looking for validation of their beliefs.

These people lived throughout the town, but usually did not work. Many seemed to be from distant locations, but had barely distinguishable accents. They had learned to live the minnesotan life well. They ate carrots and oil, avoided the trailer park, drank heavily, and could make passable conversation about the Twins. They managed to keep a social presence, and always had a story about having an office job in a nameless building in the next town, or a thankless factory job doing something so foul that he was legally bound to not talk about the company, and they had a brother in law sued into homelessness because he said the wrong thing when he was drunk at the bar with some Minnesotans. People usually didnt ask questions after that.

They met anonymously, but were anything but homogenous. Many of them had their own mental problems, albeit to a more minor degree. Almost unanimously they had been neglected children of slightly below average intelligence. They had traumatic childhoods, and slight disorders that lead to paranoia. In a few cases, they were of normal mental health, but had spent their lives in the exclusive company of paranoiacs, and had internalized the thought process to be a reasonable similitude of a genuine paranoid. Universally, they had followed conspiracy theories, and the lost knowledge of the old world.

The classic conpiratist would live in the most convenient situation, anything stable and accommodating. Not having the mettle of the other tribes of the insane, they were those with the societal issues, but without unforunate situations.

The most helpless would just sit there, introspective, developing incoherent rants on the state of the worlds anger against their minds, the possibilities open to everyone if they were just capable of listening. The tragedy is that their passion outweighed theier intelligence by more than a marginal sum, and they were completely incapable of understanding the history and science necessary to pursue the only passion they were capable of understanding.

Even more tragic were those who were less crazy, but dedicated to political and social conspiracies. They could spend their time researching media history, attempting aggressively angry interrogation of people who believed in these conspiracies. These were the people who attacked astronauts for claiming they lived on the moon because they had been to the nasa archives. They had compiled a scrapbook of pictures of everyone who had claimed to be a witness to the kennedy assassination that they could locate. The most harmless were fucking trekkies.

In this modern age, such people are well exposed to technology, and are more than comfortable with finding and digging through information that is considered “taboo” by the “mainstream”. Normal people satiate themselves with porn. Paranoiacs find an anonymous community of people who think like them. They no longer need extensive outside research, or obsessive digging of clues. The Paranoiacs can circulate and accumulate their own research, one can do the research and rely on the many for distribution.

But amongs such societies built on contempt of authority, the house ridden, internet addicted conspiracy nuts began to distrust the authority of the conspiracy underground. All the details of the current administration, all of its secrets were posted anonymously, publicly.

Anonymous users began to keep track of each other. The forums became filled with codewords. Websites sprang up with paranoiacs keeping track of words, phrases and sources of information. Smaller groups of the anonymous would build analysis machines to determine the veracity of a piece of information.

Most conspiracy theory lives on speculation and a general distrust of authority or of accepting the blessing of mass communication, but they can usually get their fill chewing on obvious conspiracies: JFK, moons dulling razors, or even the idea that werewolves are just an invention of the media.

The realism of the situation is that people who devote their time to tracking down nonexistent information in a place where it could not be found is that they are often passably technical, but rarely have the skills to effectively create an algorithm that could determine the truth of an arbitrary piece of information. In fact, if they had any kind of background in any of this shit they would know that Godel proved a much stronger theorem in a way that is much more clever than any of this conspiracy bullshit.

But logic and reason will never with with the Paranoiacs, if they have a computer program to tell you if a piece of conspiracy evidence is true or not, they will fucking believe it. Especially if its on the internet and written by a friend of theirs.

The algorithms were, while scrapped together and completely wrong, quite clever. They counted the words, looked for particular phrases. They had even built in common misspellings of people deemed untrusted by a common vote, and tracked relationships between phrases used in pieces of information that had been “confirmed”.

So from the primary, anonymous, public forums that had sprung up on the internet, a small group of people had set up an undernet of “verifiable” information. They immediately became the vanguard of the new conspiracy underground of the internet.

Their powerful relationships based off of “proved” factoids, spread quickly within the Paranoiacs community and became a common portal Well produced pieces of information would bubble up to the common conversations, curious people would stumble upon the undernet, and consider it an interesting filter.

The popularity of the undernet forced them into consolidation, they began to apply their analysis to many more streams of media and became a major conduit of information, and was a trusted indicator of the truth of any piece of media.

And during this transformation, another group split away. They began to publish the truth of the undernet. That it was based on the moderators personal opionions, that there was no truth in the objectivity. The controllers decided who was a trusted source and the veracity of any idividual claim could be changed at will. The truth for the millions who had rebelled was cast beyond them.

Not surprisingly, nothing changed, the reality that the whole new underground was just a simple company trying to cater to what people wanted to hear, but needing to take advertising money to make it happen suddenly became a plain explanation for something with such a morose history. The people who had never followed the undernet did not notice, the people who had came to accept that it was another channel of bullshit.

Not the Drachma.

The Drachma were the most avid and least trusting of the Paranoiacs. Through each iteration of the popularization of the conspiracies, they lost their golden martyrs: mary magdeline, the super kennedy brothers, brothers Malcolm and Martin. They even had to endure a crock of shit ‘da vinci code’ knock off starring Nicholas Cage.

These people thought they knew suffering.

They had lost their sainted faces on mars to better photography, alien autopsies were a hoax, and politics and national affairs were so criminal, it wasnt worth the time it took to concoct conspiracy theories.

Not the Drachma.

They knew the truth. They knew that all of the turbulence was just engineering disasters to make people stop paying attention to the details. They knew that things were passing under their nose.

They knew they werent getting the whole story. They looked down from the world of chaos and in each others company found that they could create and pick at details where no one was looking. They eschewed Hollywood details, and saw politically sponsored events as diversions.

As each Paranoiac moved away from the spotlight of the undernet, they moved away from posting anonymously and began communicating directly, over what they could see as private channel. The developed a caste system of people who were simply aware of their private network, and the people who ran it explicitly. Not only did they have to know a member personally, they were bound by a piece of text and a checkbox on the internet, so it was totally secure. Also, they had to bring a physical piece of proof of the conspiracy, and it couldn’t be any pariticular detail that had been featured on the undernet, because everyone knew that shit wasnt true.

On the new sub-undernet, the inner-circle began to construct the new theories. The theories of the forgotten. They were devoid of politics, culture, celebrity. They were irrelevant to the broken relevance detector. In the secure chatrooms, and conglomerations of dark psyches a new history emerged, a different ethos.

Bereft of reference, each new member brought an incoherent piece of unrecorded history to the meeting. In order t not be accused of being from the government or media, the information had to be unverifiable, but had to explain the arbitrariness of ordinary life.

Shoes are a conspiracy to make us walk to the phone booth.

Supermarkets are “natures little brooms”!

This is dirt from the movie soundstage where Hitler was shot!

The community became inpenetrable, and each member a true believer and so paranoid they would only bring in another anonymous face, if they met someone in passing who was equally passionate with irrlevant information but lacked an anonymous community voice. They could work together, and then cease meeting each other in person because they were on to the big secret: they were piecing together the uncut jigsaw puzzle. If any one of them were identifiable, they could all be at risk, so they could not have contact.

As the circle grew, they only knew one thing. Each one of them had a piece of the puzzle, that they couldnt tell anyone about.

Now when I say “they”, I dont mean that this is some centuries old clan, I mean this is a group of paranoid motherfuckers who got on the internet in the last 10 years (immediately post-AOL, to date this). Following the meltdown of their hallowed ground into the Web 2.0, or whatever the fuck they are calling it these days, this was a small group of disenchanted nerds, who had lived in such a self-absorbed state, of enabling relatives telling them how smart they were, that they were certain they had stumbled onto the secrets of the ages.

The wisdom was finding the knowledge no one knew. Their lives were defined entirely by social relationships on machines and through their opinions, so the fact the that their evidence was just fabrication was meaningless. They were smart, they were smart enough to find their way into the elite underground. They were smart enough to add their piece to the intricate fabrication.

Like all the others, they found acceptance. A narrow, distrusting society formed. The inner circle pieced together each piece of information, and each new member was only given shards of the outer fabrication.

Initiation was a paranoid puzzle. Once the new member presented their piece of information to the council of the inner circle, they conferred the great fabrication, recited a few minor details, and asked the initiate for their interpretation.

Before the Inner Circle had formed, each had met virtually, and naturally discussed the appearance of the inner circle at future initiations for their first meeting. They had decided on a very menacing red-lined black cloak. The prototypes were made of faux-fur, but the newly formed inner-circle had managed menacingly soft satin for their cloaks and found a great deal on custom fantasy wear on the internet.

The inner circle then set their membership policies, and decided that the veracity of claims should be determined by the framework they had set based on initiation rituals and menacing cloaks. Instead of an flawed computer algorithm controlled by biased people, they would be the arbiters of style, grace, and knowledge. They built their own history of modern times, free of the tabloids and political debauchery, based entirely on their own unpopular internet opinion.

In a club where the only way to join is to make up a story and convince them that it fits into their paranoid fantasy without actually knowing what the fantasy is, and bullshitting off of contradictory data, the members tend to be erratic.

Some are just good speakers, they are paranoid and less concerned about the details of the Great Conspiracy, but more interested in convincing other people to believe whatever the fuck he says. These people are obnoxious and ineffective.

Others are virtually mute, on and off-line, they can produce mountains of pictures and text related to the subject, but write minimally and expect that people will read their mountain of evidence without knowing what the fuck they are talking about to begin with.

Some are just schizophrenics with computers.

The inner circle worked constantly, never thinking it strange that they all lived in the same geographic region, or even that they had all met on regional channels.

“Great minds think alike, I guess”

Indeed.

They carefully constructed an intricate theory, like boys in a clubhouse, except they were all total fucking losers living in their moms basement and acting like boys in a clubhouse thinking that they had discovered the secrets of alience, the assassination of the flying kennedy brothers, and if the fucking moon landing actually fucking happened.

This was a seriously hardcore grown mens club about sharing secrets.

Just think of that next time some starts with some da vinci code shit at a party.

Through trial and error initiation, they began to piece together a tapestry of understanding. Their fabrication of the inner circle grew. It spread dimensions and became a sphere of fabrication. Each member who was vierified was in the state of Minnesota. They learned quikly by meeting at service stations who could be trusted. If someone messaged them from out of the state, they knew they could be tried on federal charges.

That level of state trust, combined with the rampant police corruption in Minnesota, drew more people into the Minnesotan sub-internet, and closer to the inner circle.

As their presence grew, the distrustful sensibilities began to take over. They had managed to stake their presence as being firmly in Minnesota, but the inner circle began to track their own trusted members. They looked at each others histories, but got bored because they all had only lived with their moms their whole fucking life.

That could not possibly stop the inner circle of a conspiracy group that insisted on unverifiability. They posed passive aggressive questions, they eyed each other conspicuously. They split into smaller groups of more trusted friends and gossiped amongst each other about the unrest each one was causing. Eventually, it was decided that their differences were small, but their paranoia went right to the fucking bone, and that this is just what the government, media, church, baby boomers, corporate fatcats, politicians, fake hippies and punk rockers want: Compromise.

After much discussion, they realized that “their disdain for each other personally was that they had to see each other in flourescent lights because flourescent lights is all the the energy department has to give us because they are more expensive and they need to burn the cold war energy, so they send it to minnesota, where we they sent each other erroneous internet messages thinking that it was part of the larger culture, but really, the government was running experiments on the midwest in order to test not only their electrical, but computer competancy and also to see if they could grow properly surrounded by electricity, corn, and also the technology that the rebel type technology alliance like the good people of this group, and also the insight of everyone who helped make this thing happen, at least along the lines of us, the inner circle, so we looked at the map and are looking at some place where we should investigate, together we represent the vanguard against the conspiracy, so it only makes sense that the government would stay camped out in this tiny enclave…COURAGE FALLS!”

Yes, Minnesota was the only place the the conspiracy could be happening, because that is where all the members of the inner circle were from, and they had excluded everyone else, so there was no reason why it wouldnt be. They had build the Great Fabrication, but it was long on listless oration, short on local geographic details. They managed to agree with each other that everything should be agreed upon, and once they all realized they were Minnesotan, they had an anonymous survey of their location.

Courage Falls was conspicuously absent from the location map. The inner circle, clothed in their awesome satin robes, looked down at the table with the map, and nodded in silent agreement. The rest of the Minnesota Paranoiacs would join them in searching for the clues of the Great Deception that they could fight with the Great Fabrication.

As the increasingly introspective group tried to keep their protocol, they jerked around in awkward gestures trying to find the way that they should determine their name.

At that moment, the initiation bell rang. Each of the inner circle rose their heads, eyes still leveled with the floor, trying not to look at each other, even though they were in cut-offs and T-shirts when they met at the Minneapolis sci-fi-con, and discussed the robes they would wear at future meetings.

They ushered out into the clearing behind their meeting place. A wild-eyed nervous scruffy man stood there, staring and sweating profusely.

The Inner Circle gathered around their podii, and pulled their hoods down to hide their faces.

The Arbiter spoke: “You know of the Circle of Fabrication?”

The Man responded: “I know of more than that.”

That was the typical response of the internet dork who showed up.

The Arbiter thusly spaketh: “Give it here,”

“Your rituals were calculated. The environments that let each of you fabricate your contributions were merely constructions of the great one to create you all.” thathly splaked the scrufferhuffenhausen.

“And your … knowledge is?”

“The knowledge is that your Fabrication is more convincing than anything I could say, and to call you by name would only make you all act in deception. You are the refuse of the unbelieved, your reality is collectively determined by each others less than sane opinion. I have been following you all for some time. Dont you recognize me? Maybe you will. Maybe I look like you. Do you remember what you look like under those cloaks? Do you even remember what you are doing? You shouldnt.

“You should feel good about that. I can’t say that I planned that, and you have no reason to believe me. All I say is that you have left the deceit of society, and again left the further deciet of that revolution. Now you sit here, within your own creator, with your own Arbiter, deciding the truth, and who is wothy of knowledge of your own Fabrication, yet you still wonder.

“You still wonder, what it is…in Courage Falls, Minnesota.”

The inner circle stood aghast at their podiums, their mommas houses suddenly echoing, miles away. Their purpose and pretense stripped by a stranger and their power and self-importance was shown in its own insignificance. They only had relevance to people that they could convince that they were important, and they had systematically avoided talking to anyone that was too accpting.

They were a bunch of crazy basement internet mamas boys, and this fucker had their number.

“How did you know about Courage Falls?” the Arbiter asked.

“I already said I was watching you. I already said you are the Drachma. Are you unaware of the implications of that?”

The inner circle collectivly raised their heads and uttered a low tone,

The sun sank on the unquestionably hot day, and Morty was no where to be found. The weasels were returning to the fields from their daily suburban hunting packs, and you could hear the crunching of dog gristle and choking on hairballs amongst their squealing numbers. The calm breeze had wiltered to stillness and the baking sun stagnation had left the fumes rising off the roads tar as it liquified. The local winos stumbled from the dark shelter of the church and pulled their hoods off their head, airing their rough hewn filthy hair.

Being that everyone is drunk in Minnesota most of the time, at night it could be hard to ferret out the winos, especially in a small forgiving town. As they passed the weasels in their metaphorical time-clock changing shifts like nurses, they picked up the trail. Scavenging rodent meat and cosmetic byproducts in search of sustinence.

And such is the way of the world. These wino’s all had their own history, their own stories and pains. They all had their excuses and their fit of clarity and torrents of bad fucking luck. Each one had a sob story, and a sympathetic plea. They were jinxed and forgotten, born on a starless night. Their parents were alcoholics, or dead, they had mental illnesses, their days had been filled with self-loathing and addiction, they never mastered the basic skills to keep running, to stay on the other side of the line. They lived on hand-outs, of what people would give them, they wore what they could find and ate what they could scavenge.

Courage Falls was a small town, but sympathy was limited as it seemed that the local homeless were always shifting and unfamiliar. Sometimes their numbers would grow, but they rarely asked for money, and were hard to connect to any local crimes, but no one likes it when their town is known for having a high turnover of transients.

There were shelters available, mostly having to do with the local churches. There were people who had some genetic tick that made them feel obligated to give their time and money to these people. Largely because it picked a sense of guilt within them thinking that their lives had been so carefree.

How ironic, then, that so many preferred to catch rats in the street. The running taboo was aggressively panhandling, and those that passed through had an unspoken kind of conduct to keep to themselves. If one were spotted out in the day, they seemed to just look out of place, or were often in a hurry from the prying eyes of the local citizenry. Both sides avoided eye contact, and the limited police force seemed to busy fucking their sisters in their broken down meth trailers than to harass transients that really seemed to just pass through town.

The churches always had a few visitors, but were the rest came from or went to was a mystery to the rest of the people. They were just glad that none of them hung around too long.

In the most depraved, the mind of a wino is a malfunctioning automaton, an irrelevant cog in a mis configured simulation. The depraved wander, reacting to their environment, but not in a way that reflects any of their prior experience, they yammer beyond their own mental control and come across as deranged and crazy. That is, by definition, deranged in crazy. They may at one point have fit in the shoe, but their brain decided that they needed big toes in the bottom of their heels and sideways ankles. Their understanding of the world no longer reflected a simplification of what was fed by the world. They lost reflection entirely and simply deflected unpredictably what was presented them. It was almost instinctively pushing anything away from them.

These were the truly helpless, the kinds that the government takes an interest in them when it becomes a public safety issue. The rest of the time the bureacrats held the same opinion of every body else, empty-gestured sympathy and an unspoken feeling that they might just be better off if they died were no one ever found their body. When it became an issue, or they were forced to take them as a ward, the tactic was to put them away and leave them on megadoses of generic antidepressents. There is no incentive to insure the homeless, and implicitly it was understood that people who could not feed themselves were not worth the cost of intesive study or premium medications, let alone be set down a path to adaptability.

There were varying degrees of this, of course, but universally, this group was beyond redemption. Any actions taken could hardly even be considered the result of decision making, let alone any kind of rationale.

These kinds frequented the churches. Their aimless movements made them easy targets for the do-gooders who were convinced they were doing the work of a caring god. In actuality, they were too stupid to play scrabble, and too uptight to watch TV. Like everyone else in religious volunteering, they had too much priviledge to not have to join the rat race, and too shallow to look into their own development. They thought the only answer was to make people think like them by giving them basic things to think that they are spreading their luck, their affluence, their moral superiority with them.

They worked hard, they did the right thing. At least what they thought was the right thing. But they really didnt care about any of the people. There was sympathy, sure, there were twinges of sadness, but when asked why they spent so much time, so much effort to help these people. These pathetic automatons, these people who had no cognition, no senses, who lived on poor instinct. People, who, without the net of society would have fallen off of a cliff, or been eaten by a fierce animal went it was but a succulent, tender baby with mental illnesses. When asked, the volunteers would almost universally mention the satisfaction. The satisfaction of hard work, of making a difference.

Of helping.

These people helped the wretches. They helped them stay alive another day. They made sure they could spend a few more hours in delirium, in joyless misery, in an obfuscated cloud terrified by what they could see and what wasnt there, ranting their endless siren song, stumbling towards their own certain demise, their own destruction wrought by their inability to even care for themselves.

Yes, these good samaritans, these good church people, the ones helping, they did not bring one person back from the brink, they did not have any nurturing, they did not bring one of them into their home, or their life. They did not teach, they did showed only the most basic false compassion to these people that they really just wished werent in their town.

They did not change anyone’s life, they just made sure they lived long enough to go die in someone else’s town. Of course this was done in the name of caring and compassion, but in their mind these people were just animals, just stray mangy dogs that could not even catch a wounded shrew.

The church allowed people to stay overnight, but had many rules of conduct: no drinking, they had to be out by dawn, before the morning ceremonies, they had to sit through the preachers insufferable lectures, they had to be polite, and act humble and thankful. They had to squelch their own troubles and act as though each scrap of bread was the first merciful act that they had witnessed, they had to give the satisfaction that the housewives had slaved to earn and come to respect. They had to submit, not to the giant invisible monster in the sky that will make you burn for all eternity because he loves you, but to lonely aunt mildred who brings youthcakes and cookies for desert. They are not allowed to tell stories of their depravity, they are not allowed to confess their love of drugs and anguish over the supreme one, they must pay lip service, they must act like they have seen the true generosity and spirit of the holy light, they must pay their respects, and since they have no silver to stuff in the rectory coiffer, they must sacrifice that which they have already given: their dignity.

And this is why only the really crazy ones stayed in the churches at night. They were too unaware and too helpless to know any better.

There were also vagrants. They passed through town, sometimes they had a beat up old car, sometimes they were just hippies mistaken for disgusting homeless people, because they smelled so bad. A few had figured out a short circuit of which churches could be extorted, which volunteers could be sweet talked with a bumpkin accent and a pledge to do right. They knew when to show up, and when to skip a few days and join the rest in the rat hunt, so they could come back looking dissheveled and the old ladies would smile their empty smiles and wish their hateful well-wishings. These ones would sneak in and out in the commotion of the peak of the soup kitchens, they would would sleep in the outlying cornfields and had managed their own roots in this small town, and knew the traffic flows where they could hitch a ride, or sneak in the back of a pickup truck at the service station where the family men would stop off for malomars and twinkies for their fat diabetic children. These men would make their crosses and wag their tongues, and say “there but for the grace of god” and choose the same ignorance and chemicals that had built the foundation for their children that so many had lost their path on.

These were the most slothful, the ones who were smart, but lacked any interest in being in society. They were on the outskirts, but had fallen so far that they did not even want to shack up in the local trailer park. Probably for the better, it was full of methed up crack bitch sisters of the local police and was always swarming with drunken horny cops, rich with their pedophilic blood money. You would have to be even crazier than the lost souls in the church to set foot in there.

These were people who were borderline enough to not keep their lives together, or even want home. Some were early adopter survivalists, people who moved through the contry side and preferred to live with the animals in nature. They could kill deer with their bare hands and drank their piss if no water could be found. They retained enough sensibilities to deal with people only in the capacity that they could get something from them.

Like their urban counterparts, this breed of transient had spent their days exploring the area surrounding the small towns, they knew shortcuts, and hiding places. They were aware of the others in a cursory sense, and would occasionally cross path’s with another while they were in their maniac disguises, leeching from the soup kitchens. They knew well enough than to show their faces in daytime, they stayed in the area and were too recognizable for a bunch Minnesotan’s with nothing better to ddo than take notes on the people they didnt know personally that looked like they couldnt be trusted.

Survivalists, they had figured out the local landscapes, they knew the seasons and farms, they knew where they could hunt for rabbits and squirrels, and where to start a fire where it wouldnt be seen by the townspeople. A few had cultivated small caves, or scavenged tents from the town and set them up discreetly, away from roads and prying eyes.

Beyond these, there were the drifters, these moved from town to town, and were sometimes found in small groups. They were people who were more sociable and trusting, and did not have a taste for living alone in caves in the woods. They were not above lounging around town looking shady, or even passing through the trailer park. They occasionally hit the church circuit, and a few were charismatic enough to charm drinks from the locals at the tavern or pickpocket the dazed folks coming from the Electrology salon.

These were closer to the more common urban homeless many teenagers or young adults from unstable situations, some had turned to drugs, some were just pursuing a path less destructive than what they were born into, the ones with drug problems had still not hit bottom, and could still be seen as having hope for redemption, they were charming scammers, or could find affinity with a local who would see them as the dumb kid they used to be.

They stuck together, moved in packs, and while they didnt always trust each other, they knew they couldn’t trust anyone else. They were far from urban decrepitude, and were petty criminals at best, stealing cheeto’s and sodas when no one was looking. They were the reason most people didnt like the homeless around, but were generally the most social and least dangerous. They also usually had the sense to keep moving.

Like any small town, the local teenagers were sometimes hard to spot as different. With their limited exposure to the world, they stayed away from the outsiders and sought comfort with what few friends they had grown up with. They came from poor homes, and usually shunted the lives of the rest of the locals, being too familiar. They would joke with each other and spent their times wandering through the local parks, and trying to look menacing. Grouped by their insecurity, they grabbed on whatever local culture was available to them, and even more to what they thought was going on outside their small town.

The local kids who were from especially downtrodden situations glommed on to the drifters, they could see a life beyond the cards they had been dealt, they found friends who seemed to make more sense then what they had been hearing from their friends and families their entire lives. Eventually, even the most relectant of these most hopeless would find themselves homeless and without the means to stay in the relative comfort. Their friends would turn, or would find their despair burdensome, there would be no choice but to follow the recent drifters out of town.

These groups would comprise some of the best memories for those that were part of them. In a typical human drama of making the most of nothing, they would work together to scrape up their means of surviving, the newest and youngest would have to pay their dues: just to enter, they would have to be savvy at stealing from the service stations. When the convenient fare was finished, they had to do the skinning of local animals that were trapped by the more experienced hunters, they had to collect branches for fires and keep the late night lookouts in the cold months. When food was running low, they would live on the feet, intestines and eyeballs of the gamey rabbits that were slow enough to be caught.

This group had still not developed the proper survival skills, and did not have the background or interest to treat it as a science. They relied heavily on scrapping together discarded technology: radios, tape decks and old televisions. Too dependent on civilization, they were unable to keep an unobtrusive camp, and were constantly being shut down or being chased out of town.

Morty pulled himself back to his feet. He shook off the last lingering sleep and felt it quickly replaced by pains covering the destructable parts of his body. He stepped again into the bathroom and blinked at the mirror.

It had apparently been days since he had last shaved. Something struck him as unnatural about the whole affair. Unclean. Wrong. Not-right. Aright. Unright.

“I shouldnt have to shave to look spiffy”, he thought to himself out loud. “Maybe there is a better way.”

He clipped his scraggly beard down, with his manicure scissors for his face (Morty had lots of manicure scissors, all with very specific names and uses). And clipped it until it was just a whisp of peach fuzz. Then he ran cold water in the sink, dipped a razor in it and dragged it across the remaining hair. Without any shaving cream.

In Minnesota, this is what they call “Minnesota Shaving,” it was meant to be a daily metaphor for life in Minnesota: painful and pointless. The proper method was to drag the blade slowly, not quite against the face, so it would pull each hair individually. The brisk sensation certainly woke old Morty up. He would have screamed, but was already almost crippled from the pain of his previous misadventures and this posed an almost welcome diversion.

As he finished, Morty felt most of the haze of the morning disappear, but still could not remember where he had been since his initial blackout, he just had a strong desire to get rid of his facial hair.

“Elec…trolysis?” he said to himself in a rare orgy of insight and self-discovery.

“No, Mortymer, no” he continued, assuming his only voice of condescention: the one he used to talk to himself, “no no no no no no no!”

“Electrolysis is for women only”

It was true, electrolysis did seem to be for women only, but there was something unnatural about that. Why should women be allowed electroshock treatment to remove hair from their body that was unnatural, in order or their own spiffiness.

See, in this instance, Morty was relying on the Spiffy Matrix from Standfords 1962 study in daily spiffiness. Morty took this to heart, even though he didnt trust Californians. Among other things, the Spiffy Matrix helped the researchers calculate, indisputably, that exposed parts of the body were generally more spiffy the less body hair that was showing, unless it was hair, in which case the inverse was true. The spiffy matrix also approved of shiny smiles and fancy suits. Two things that Morty really took to heart.

“So, either god doesnt want me spiffy, or its my duty to fight the tide and try to be spiffy, no matter what anyone says?”

“Exactly, Mortymer, no”

“That’s not making any sense.”

“So? You are talking to yourself.”

Morty had a rare moment of clarity when he realized that he was too stupid to have a comeback to something that he said to himself. He blinked, shook his head, and stepped out of the bathroom, and out his front door. He noticed a strange dent in the floor in the shape of his face, and wondered why that was there.

As he made it up the stairs, and out of the basement, he saw the sun shine, and it left a big headache in the back of his eyeballs. It was some serious pain, it felt like two screws in through his retina being yanked out the back by dental floss being tied through hoops. It caused a sharp of pain in the back of his sinuses, and he reflexively started sneezing uncontrollably. He stared bleary eyed out and saw the door, and headed towards it, still sneezing violently.

By the time he got out the door, Morty was a shrieking bad of spittle, he would have scared a fucking polar bear. He stumbled down the steps, clumsily, bearly able to keep his balance because of his injuries and staggered away in the shade of a tree, barely crying, mumbling and lightly flailing his arms.

He ducked in an alleyway, pinched his nose and regained his composure. Breathing deeply, he stepped back out on to the sidewalk and headed out towards the main road.

The main road in the greater Courage Falls area had the service station, where people got their service. A clothing store that specialized in suits and maternity dresses, and 3 different booths selling pre-made carrots and oil, which no real Minnesotan would consider food, but it came in perfect sizes for sneaking into the movie theatere. The movie theater was a small shack where people stood and watched an ancient projector tick away at what little dignity these people had left. This was the new theater. The old theater got ravaged by wolverines and then set on fire by the local police when a couple of them failed in a sister-swapping bet.

There were other amenities, a barber shop, a hair salon, a bicycle repair shop. The bike store was unusual in that it sold stolen bikes, but also employed a few local hooligans to steal any bikes that were sold, so nobody actually had any bicycles except the owner of the stolen bicycle store. At night it was the home of an under aged prostitution ring, frequented by the police.

Thats just how things are in Minnesota.

Finally, Morty found the new shop. Frepointe Electrolysis. He remembered the flyer. It seemed right. And he had to do right.

He stepped in the shop, it had a pungent aroma of beeswax, burnt hair and arm pit. It was surprisingly bustling for the early Saturday morning, and Morty noticed many prominent Courage Fallians baring their bodies with a stroke of diginity and elegance. A light conversational murmur ribboned through the boutique, yet it seemed that there were no immediate attendents.

“Hello?”,

A midget transvestite in pink hot pants walked by him.

“Takes all kinds, in Courage, Minnesota!” Morty thought to himself.

Another midget transvestite in pink hot pants walked up. It had a surprisingly deep voice.

“Electroylsis, eh? Where do you want it? Balls? Legs? Toes? I can shock it all out. You like Ghandi? You want to look like Ghandi? Electroysis on your balls! Makes your hair fall out! You want the mayor’s special? Just pull it out up to your sock line so it feels silky smooth all the way up. We also got the slash-n-burn, thats for your crotch.”

Morty said “why does god make me shave to look spiffy? And if I dont shave and can still look spiffy, is that actually the right thing to do?”

“Sh..shave?” the midget stammered. You want electrolysis so you dont have to SHAVE?”

The store went silent. All eyes were on Morty. Voluntarily opting out of doing the Minnesota Shaving was a prosecutable offense during the McCarthy era.

“I have to do right, Mister.” Morty said reluctantly.

“Well, OK, freakshow, lets see what we can do.”

He grabbed Morty’s hand and led him through the open air electrolysis stations, sitting him down far from the windows, in the back.

“You might not want to let anybody see you get this done. Tell ya what, Ill fix it in. It’ll still look natural, you dont wanna be a waxface, do ya, kid?”

“Will I look spiffy?”

“Better’n ya look now, you look like you shaved with manicure scissors, and have been sleeping in that suit for days. Shaddup now, Ill give you the house special.”

The midget handed him a small rubber ball to chew on.

“Bite down on that.”

The midget quickly slapped a strip of duct-tape across his mouth.

“Thats to keep it in, here we go!”

Electrolysis is a process where a small metal pole is inserted into the hair follicle and blasted with electricity and RF radiation. The midget pulled out a stylus with a thick, coiled cable running back to the primary machine. The primary machine was a 7 foot tall cabinet, adorned with switches and dials, two tesla coils sat on top, gathering electricity and discharging over the conversations below. The ambient electricity made all the hair on the puny humans bodies stand on end. The stylus input to the cabinet was two large jumper cables and followed up to the tip of the stylus which was only 51.3 picometers. Just enough to shock the shit out of a hair follicle.

The midget pulled his safety gloved hand down on his visor mask, and set on Morty. With each follicle, a high pitched doppler sound whizzed by and created a sharp crackling sound with each follicle.

Morty sat there gagged, afraid to move, feeling the poker sliding into the follicles, heating up, and the final charge sizzling the hair. Followed by another, and another. Each hair leaving a trace of a burnt smell. Being forced to breathe through his nose, he finally realized that the stench of arm-pit was coming from the midget.

And he sat there paralyzed, unfocused on the slow moving prod being driven into his face, delivering electric currents. Channeling out the surrounding odors, missing the witty banter of his neighbors. He sat there unnerved hoping that he would truly look spiffy. And all the while, the midget carried on.

“Yeah, y’know, if you asked me, I dont think it ever would have occurred to me to take a job doing this, let alone in the middle of Minnesota, y’know, I wasnt always a midget, not too long ago I was Horton, the Garlic Lovin Vampire, yeah I’d go from town to town and show people how I could live off drinking the blood of livestock, but I also really liked raw garlic. It was all a scam of course, but I wasnt technically a midget, because I stood on stilts underneath my Vampire cloak, so no one could really tell.

“Anyway, that didnt pan out, because people just found out I liked inflicting pain on people with sharp objects. Well, that got me run out of Clearwater Utah, so I hit the road as a traveling scarification and branding expert. Along the way I became a specialist in giving people tattoos made with chicken bone pens and beetle-blood ink. There wasnt much of a market for that kind of esoterica at the truck stops of Arizona and Utah, so I kept moving.”

Morty finally became a little concerned about the person doing the procedure, but his hands were so precise, he jumped from pore to pore almost immediately.

“So I settled in to chicago, with some kind of alternative scene house. They liked having a midget around, and I liked leaving permanent marks on the vagrants who slept on the benches around the house. I made enough money robbing them that I was able to invest in a new invention: the heated tattoo gun. It worked just like a normal tattoo gun, except that it kept the needle hot, so it hurt more. It was great for tough guys: bikers, truckers, drunks. But it all went bust when I went to jail for attempted murder.

“That gave me a lot to think about, I realized I should be trying a different path. Then I got the word.”

Morty mouthed “Grrghhgghg FFRrghrhggh.”

“Yeah,” the midget continued, “it was really something, I learned the word ‘Electrology’, which they all call electrolysis here. It sounded like a new challenge, kind of Zen like, y’know. I think of it like that old game operation. I just pretend that if I miss the follicle that I’ll get electrocuted. One second….”

Morty stood still, a single bead of sweat dripped from his bushy eyebrows.

The midget pulled a pair of tweezers out of his pocket and ripped the last hair with a flourish, jumped in a circle. And landed squatting on the ground.

He reached back without looking and ripped the Duct Tape off of Mortys Lips. The ball fell out with 20 minutes of accumulated terror drool.

Morty stood speechless, sweating, and pained. While his face was indestructible, his follicles were clearly not, and a dull pain seemed to make his face feel like it was glowing, which was good because his shiny small had faded.

“Ladies, and Gentleman, I give you, ANOTHER MASTERPIECE!” and pointed at Morty.

The crowd shared a hushed awe, and slowly began applauding. Chaotic at first, but eventually syncopated and rhythmic. Morty sat in a daze, but felt himself being pulled to his feet. He had pulled the ring of his diseases to the ringing in his ear and was floating out of his chair, he could see the duct tape billowing in the exhaust of the air conditionter. He passed a mirror, but his vision was blurring again, he felt himself slipping in and out of consciousness, he was smiling into a marshmallow and swimming in a cup of jello.

“…and you can pick up your tab the next time…”

Morty floated out of the clinic and up the main road, the blackness closing back in. Intoxication set in, the air grew stagnant and reeked of ammonia, the sky turned purple and set over the sun. The day grew dark and the road a head beckoned. Morty once again broke his routine and walked towards the edge of town.

The fulfillment of the task, the emptiness of his life. The terror, the memory blanks. He was left passive in his mind just watching the processes skip by. His body had been beaten into complacency, and he just walked on, as if in a dream. With no opinions other than acceptance, he simply accepted the choices he was making even though it now seemed like he was no longer making them.

Morty stumbled past the distractions of the main road, and into the small residential sector. He was nowhere near his apartment building, it was getting to the middle of an unseasonably warm day, and he was just wandering. His face was drooped into a plain dull unquestioning stare, and he slumped forward on each step like a zombie sleepwalker. A few strands of spittle still hung from his chin and were flapping in the gentle breeze strung down to his loosened tie. His active mind had taken such a backseat that he was unaware of his purposelessness. He shuffled along the sidewalk, in a mostly straight line, but turned corners randomly and traced an erratic pattern through the traces of small apartment buildings and cheaply constructed duplexes, unaware of the people around him, stumbling across the street without checking for traffic, and occasionally getting smacked in his indestructible face by neighborhood children with wiffle bats.

It would have been the longest saturday morning of his life, if he could have only remembered it.

In the beginning, when we were all still lizards, we began the inklings of what we would call body language. As we grew into more habitable environments and lost most of our natural weapons, we decided to band together into societies. As our scales refined, and our eyes lost their red, we kept the same singnals: gnashing our teeth, spitting venom in the faces of our enemies. This is the basis of society, catering the violent urges of the lizard brain.

Modern evolutionary theory is lacking because it does not pay homage or diginity to the reptillian stage of mammal development. The reptiles are responsible for many of our truly salient features: survival instinct, habitability, routine. Changing colors, eating bugs. These things we have willingly shunted in this modern era because of the unwritten rule of the modern world: We are not reptiles.

In fact this is really a conspiracy by the western ruling class, particularly in countries with historical royalty or have families of politicians. They are, in fact, pureblood descendents of the overlord lizards. They have retained their color changing ability to retain In the great lizard uprising in prehistoric societies, one of the excerpts of the treaties were that the overlord lizards would be inbred into retardation. You can find these to this day in Asia, the Monitor Lizards, Kimodo Dragons, they are the inbred cousins of the people who rule the world.

As they ran early society for thousands of years, they kept amongst themselves, but maintained a diversity through egg trading during insemination season: each lizard would exchange and fertilize one of each other ruling families eggs, so there was a constant cross-mix. The plebian types were kept separate, but not nearly as pure. Given their lizardly mastery of adaptation, they began to evolve on a separate path, gaining emotional competence, and soft, flabby skin.

This was in part a guided evolution, as the overlord lizards preferred to eat the soft flesh of a common lizard because it felt less like cannibalism, and more like slave-murder, with a hint of cannibalism.

When the numbers of soft, pasty lizards outgrew the grip of the overlord lizards, they rose up and made some Monitor Lizard making cages, but a small faction escaped the retardation, and scattered into the wild.

Having grown highly dependent on the now revolutionary and disorganized society, they found themselves unable to be separate, so they stayed on the outskirts of the now widespread diaspora of what would become common people.

The overlord lizards had to resurrect the lost art of lizardry, they did target practice with their venom, strengthened their camoflage, and used their fork tongues to manipulate whatever languages they could afford to learn. They lived in attics and on rooftops, in wells and shrubberies, and continued to adapt. Their contempt of the common people, and their ability to disguise themselves, made them excellent spies, and they gained the parlance and demeanor of the common leaders. They began to approach them as visions in their dreams, being contrary advisors. They would warn the leaders against policies and use their visage as a warning of the old times. This in turn would cause such a visceral reaction that the leaders would immediately move against it, often to the pain of their people. The people then grew distrustful of politics, distrustful of power.

Connivingly, the remaining overloard lizards, now well schooled in their trickery, had managed to change their appearance to be passable as commoners, and attacked the society from all possible angles.

Some planted revolutionary ideas among the people. Having been a victim previously, they were well equipped to sort out the people who were capable of such things regardless of their situations. Others architected strange coincidences to become aquainted with, and then befriend another familiy. Having spied on their personal affairs for years, this posed little problem. Other preferred to live as ghosts, to manipulate their target as a puppet. As each moved in, and got accepted by society, they were able to refer other overlord-lizards-in-disguise to each other, and soon were well represented in all areas of the fledgling society.

As their influence grew, so did their lust for more power. Friends became partners, and partners would disappear. Through plotting, manipulation, and assassination, the leaders disappeared and were replaced by the now trusted overlord-lizards-in-disguise.

In a final masterstroke, the lizards staged a scandal between themselves, and separated, each leaving in a separate direction, and taking their share of the common people they could convince to come with them. As they filed off, each group settled around their new-found leader and did as he asked. They had followed through two revolutions, and were now in the servitude of the same people they had rebelled against.

As these packs of lizards and people gathered, the question of aristocracy had been settled, no one discussed the old ways, and the lizards kept up a low hostility towards each other society, which could easily be flared to war. In truth, though, the lizards still had to keep contact, because they could no longer interbreed with people.

Which is why they killed princess Di.

In fact, there is not much genetic difference between people and the ruling class overlord-lizards, just enough to make it infertile. Also, those people still lay eggs.

Which is why the people who are in power stay in power. Which is why those same people seem to despise the common folk. which his why evolution that says we are mammals does not honor the lizard heritage and our painful past.

With this basis we could break from the lizard and become mammals, which are cool because lizards dont have tits. The tits part of the brain is totally mammal. The shepherds of society lack our best interests, we, as mammals, as puny humans, must resist the indoctrination of the overlord lizards, and their inbred Monitor Lizard cousins.

Morty found himself awake again. He had landed, indestructible face first into the metal seal of the doorway of the plastic bathroom. He took a deep breath and pulled himself up.

“Golly, we are having a baaaa-aaad day!”

His face may have been indestructible, but his skin could still crease. There was a solid line across the length of his forehead where it had been pressed into the doorframe. Morty pushed himself to his feet, and felt the cramp where he had hit himself. His vision was still blurred, and he staggered back towards his bed and lay face down.

And there was a knock at the door.

Morty was a corpse. He was bleached, burnt, scalded, and had run into sharp metal corners from multiple angles. And that doesnt even explain what he didnt remember doing. Let alone falling through the window on his face.

He lay there, but the door kept knocking.

“I should be at work”

He could hear a muffled voice with the knocking.

“An unanswered door is like an unopened present on Christmas Day,” Morty thought to himself.

He grabbed the ground with his hand and pulled himself off the bed onto his knees. He struggled to pull himself together; then, lurching he made his way past the lone TV and into the narrow corridor that housed the kitchen and the doorway to the one-piece bathroom. The kitchen had been built into a recess into the foyer to accommodate the bathrooms of neighboring apparentments. All the plumbing ran through two pipes, the in pipe and the out pipe. In order to build more aparements effectively, the Bathrom and Construction Conglomeration designed the plumbing with minimum distance measurements on the inputs and outputs, so Mortys tap water was visibly connected to the same pipe that filled his neighbors toilet. Morty guess it was probably the same for his, except that he lived in the basement.

“Just how the world is, I guess” Morty would say to himself.

As he approached the door, the knocking stopped, and he heard a key rattling. Suddenly the door burst in, smacking Morty in ear and knocking him off his balance.

“Morty!? MORTY!?” It was Mrs. Pansllaro, she looked dumbly across the room, not noticing that she had just knocked him out.

“IT SATURDAYS!” She gummed.

Morty lay writhing at her feet,quivering, his vision turning to black. The last thing he heard was the door closing.

Morty woke up, fully clothed, on top of his bed. He was lying on his back, with his fingertips pressed tightly together, and his wrists resting on his chest. He eyeballs were dry. He had no idea where he had been. He came to a quick moral quandry because he wasnt sure how to change into his fancy suit from his sleeping garments because he had slept in his fancy suit. These truly are the questions of our days.

Morty got up regardless, disheveled. His sort pink dress shirt no longer accentuated his shiny teeth. His tie knot sagged, and he had apparently not shaved for quite some time, though not enough to get the legally qualified “Montana Beard Discount”. His carrot jar was empty, but his apartment was immaculate.

“Gotta stay spiffy,” Morty said to himself, and walked crotch-first into his desk.

Finally kicking off his shoes, he stumbled into the bathroom. It was dingy yellow and appeared to be made of a single piece of plastic.

In fact it was. It was product #15837B of Atlantic Bathrooms, Inc. Located in Detroit. An entrepreneur realized that if you combined the machinery to make baby cages and the machinery to make cars you could make giant machines that make single piece bathrooms. They were actually made out of the recycled medical implants of reclaimed orphans, and their clothing. Other plentiful public sources of bathroom grade plastic came from retiring dolphin nets made of six pack holders that were used in the great lakes. People in the Midwest thought they could catch dolphins there. In a lake so polluted that you can set it on fire.

Anyway, Atlantic Bathrooms, Inc had virtually re-invented the modern broke-ass singles apartment lifestyle with the self contained bathroom. With this design, they were able to construct apartment buildings based around the single constant commodity: the water. With this mindset, they were able to work with Conglomerated Construction, Ltd to create a fleet of apartment buildings based around a cheap, mass manufactured, replaceable bathroom, while keeping the living quarters so cramped that it was supremely difficult for even one person to be in. Because of this, the places were usually empty, or the tenants were sleeping. Electricity and fuel requirements were kept to a minimum, the occupants usually ate out or had prepared meals. Little more than a small TV was necessary, and the occupants slept in whatever bed could fit.

The bathrooms were pure utility, a simple toilet, with a single joint on the seat, the rest fused to the floor. A small sink, and a shower with a curtain, but no barrier. All drains went to the center of the room. Atlantic Bathrooms had decided that it was more cost efficient, in the case of a sink or toilet overflow, to have a central drain, but too expensive to have a separate drain for the shower. They were sunk into the building, so there was a 4.3 inch step into the bathroom, so water would not overflow.

They were always clean, polished, and neat. Because they had automated spray hoses that covered the one-piece bathroom in bleach and rinsed it down the central drain with scalding hot water.

Which is, unfortunately, what they were doing when Morty walked in fully clothed.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” said Morty.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” he continued.

“MY EYES AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Fortunately, the walked in at the end, so his suit only got splattered with bleach, and his eyes were only blasted with scalding water. He backed out of the bathroom, but caught his heel on the raised edge, tripped back and hit the small of his back against the sharp corner of his kitchen counter (did I mention that in Minnesota, it is legal to make your bathroom open directly into your kitchen?).

Morty, thoroughly defeated by the world 73 seconds after waking up from a blackout, fell to his knees screaming, his scalded tear-ducts weeping steam.

The Astounding Flounders were a rock duo from Cincinatti. They were not particularly interesting. What could be of interest is that they … nope, sorry, not working. Nothing interesting about these guys.

The advertising that had floored Morty seemed innocuous enough: a standard celebrity endorsement of a womens hair removal station. But this was not your average celebrity. It was a professional athlete, who had no qualms about advertising himself to sell any product even if it did not relate to his own profession. In addition to having success in scoring many commercial contracts, he also was quite successful in his current occupation, though how remained a mystery, because he played soccer, and soccer requires no skill which is why only children, communists and Europeans play it. And Spectral Man-Bitches from Hell!

I guess I should explain. In the year of puny humans known as 877 A.D., an offshoot of a cult of satanic mercenaries in Jolly Old England Decided that they were not getting their message as the one true religion of vicious assassins they set out to prove a point.

They were the Drachma.

They set along the English countryside killing ferrets and raping longshoreman, burning squirrels, insulting town fanfare, and, most importantly, assassinating people well.

Take the case of Agnse Ambous, the plump choir leader in the forgotten town of Evenshitter. An assassin of Drachma appeared at the local apothecary selling victuals and sundries of the highest caliber, of Mrs. Ambose and learned her secrets, her weak constitution, her fear of persecution, her love of rich foods. In her servants, his cavalier actions sparked discontent, and through his well-cultivated informants, he learned of a plan by the servants to poison him. He ingeniously orchestrated a change of plates at the last minute, and Ambrous fell victim to the poisoned blood pudding stuffed turnip dumplings.

The assassin left a note confessing the crime only after he publicly persecuted and hanged all of the servants, including his informants.

There was another time where like four of them got some rocks and just kicked the shit out of this guy. I mean, they beat his ass to death, eyes hanging out and everything. Then they just took off, and no one saw them again.

Anyway, so the Drachma, lit the country side on fire with an unrelenting strike of violence. They slit the throat of every infant and gathered the blood in a single vial. They burned the crops and butchered the livestock and left it to rot. They spared the lives of villagers, but left them childless cripples capable only of killing each other for food as they slowly starved to death.

They took no money, so each man was left with their worthless wealth with nothing to fulfill it. They took no food or water, just lives and capability. And when they had finally filled the vial with the blood of the slaughtered infants, and created a vacuum of generations, when they had finally narrowed the British gene pool to an eternity of big ears, buck teeth and hairy noses, were homely (that means “cute” to them) children grow into ugly men who drip into hideous caricatures of their own heinousness, they gathered.

They gathered to the evil patriarch of the British: the Man-Bitch. The built the mother of all bon fires and sacrificed the local woodland animals. They poisoned trees and carved obscene drawings on rocks to curse future generations.

They threw carcasses in the rivers and choked the earth with brushfires, they spread misery in a sphere of destruction. And when the elements were all poisoned with the blood of the innocent, they crowded in a circle, poured the blood of the infants on the ground and chanted:

“Estus Pueltoti Lippi Wendoufulli”, which in Olde English meant “We summon the Spectral Man-Bitch of Hell!”

Again they chanted, as the blood drained to the ground, again as it seeped into the ground, again and again as it grew dark and thick in the heat of the fires and bodies surrounding it. The waiting turned to wailing, and the Drachma suffered. Unable to move as proscribed by their convictions, and unable to live in their own state; they were being assassinated by their own discipline. And as they weakened around the hardening pile of blood, a pale specter rose. At first it was just hints of a blue flame around the puddle, but as it grew, it drew on the serious emo pain that the assassins were feeling.

The huddle of assassins rippled in collapse, with each ring the flames grew larger. The specter loomed.

Concentrated between the dancing shadows of the endless fucking forest fires, and with the hue of the blue specter, a form appeared: a small shell. It floated silently to the center of the group. The group collapsed in death. They had razed the countryside and left a populace steeped in idolatry.

And from that, he grew. A wart on the ground at first, but then a slovenly moss. The moss pimpled to a fungus, oozing along the ground. The fungus devoured and assimilated, and grew. As it consumed, it also destroyed. It left the earth scorched and the air smokey where it moved. It dissolved rock and beast alike. And as it consumed, it grew. It built more mass and refined its consumption. It targeted anything close by and devoured it whole, claws and appendix alike.

When it reached the stature of a man, its skin coagulated and he took a calculatedly sculpted look. One born of aeons of destruction. The wellspit of despair, the bastion of angst, his focus of hatred was only matched by his animosity toward the helpless.

He lived in the woods for decades. Living in the shadows of the town and feeding off of the domesticated animals. He always collected the pelts and would save the bones to leave as warning signs to local hunters. As his dexterity increased he would weave pelt scraps into rope and tie the dried bones into intricate jewelry.

He could only roar, his vocal chords were too raw to make any enunciable sound, but so tiny that he had a high voice like a Eurotrash Princess. When he roared, it squealed, frightened livestock, made dogs snarl and infants cry. But his development was incomplete, so he sat in the shadows, cloaked in squirrel pelts, squealing into colloquialisms and local legends.

Disoriented, Morty pulled himself to his feet and didn’t even notice the postcard blowing away in the wind.

“Hey, its good to see you’re Ok, man. The power lines is what do it. Its because the government has too much energy. You missed it, man! The cold war is over we’re running too high on the surplus of energy we needed to run the cold war machine.”

Morty noticed the man’s hands were lightly bandaged. He was wild-eyed, and disheveled, but not particularly smelly like most bums. He blinked twice quickly.

“That makes sense right? Do you understand?”

“I … I think so.”

“Yeah, well the Department of Energy, the DOE, they controlled the energy policy and got all the coal companies. They stock piled coal and everyone switched to nuclear energy in order to make the by products to make our bombs for the cold war. The cold war ended. And we had all this byproduct, thats when the DOE started building the pipes all over the country, but they decided to do it through local governments. That way they could burn all the extra energy in the pipes from the coal and nuclear energy they stock piled. Does that make sense? Are you getting what I’m saying?”

“Who?”

“Look, you see I was in an accident, I was doing some work, thats how I hurt my hands, but I was moving some bushes. I was moving the bushes out in the field. I saw it, there were power lines right over me. I look down and there’s a manhole, it says ‘New Jersey department of electricity,’ do you know where I was, can you tell me where I was?”

“…I..”

“I was just in Arizona, on the Arizona New Mexico border! Do you get it? It was from New Jersey! What was it doing in Arizona? It was the end of the pipe! But the pipes not long enough now, there’s still too much energy so they started running it through the phone lines. Makes you think weird thoughts, standing near phone lines. Everything has just been in overdrive higher and higher power just in the AIR! Just in the fucking air, man. I bet thats what happened to you, there was just to much energy running through the power lines. Those sons a bitches don’t care who they hurt. Do you get that? You OK, man, seemed like a bad fall. My name’s Dennis.”

“Elec… electrolysis?”

“Yeah…YEAH! I think you’re right. Electrolysis, isnt that where they make water from electricity and it leaves a radioactive byproduct. They just dont know when to stop. They probably want to start getting electricity into water because it conducts and they just can’t get rid of it all!”

“I … I have to do right, Mister.”

“You wanna do right you can do me a big favor and show me where the Jukebox is. I know its bad, just burning more electricity, just doing what the government wants, but … but we all gotta do what we gotta do. And right now you gotta take me to the closest Jukebox.”

Morty stood there, still stunned and reconciling the world with the void. His brain was slowly restarting, rebuilding almost from scratch through the memories of his tedious life. A time-lapse film of extraordinary routine, so completely uninteresting, that when anything beyond his routine happened, it barely phased him. As though he were simply unable to accommodate the things presented to him outside of his narrow understanding of the universe. Beyond a simple willing denial or sought ignorance, a complete incomprehension of what was put before him.

But he did know where a jukebox was.

The Sweltering Fish Boat was the local tavern around Morty’s apartment building. Since Morty was not a normal person he did not find it alcohol a soothing way to drown his sorrows, because he didn’t have any. His uncomprehending acceptance of what life had presented him had left him in a blissful, but unguided state. He had been by the tavern enough to have looked in the window and seen the Jukebox. He dully nodded and walked from the mailboxes out of the apartment building and down the street.

The tavern was open, and the morning clientele of wino’s were grumbling quietly amongst themselves or staring blankly at the prior days sports reports . Dennis fumbled in his jacket for some change and managed to find a dollar bill and a few quarters.

“This is great, man, this is good, hold on im getting to the jukebox there.”

The jukebox was standard dingy bar fair. It had been designed in the late 80′s when CD’s were gaining mass-market traction and had been made to look like a classic 50′s diner Jukebox, but with CD’s instead of 45′s. Like everything else from the 80′s it had been made with a tarnish of the era, stained by cheap materials and remnicint more of low budget imported crap than any actual style. The lights had been replaced many times over and hummed with a dingy green tint. The inside of the glass had accumulated a film from two decades of accumulated filth and smoke. The painted chrome dashboard had chipped and the number buttons were worn into smooth black nubs, the numbers no longer visible, and the rount dent of fingers contrasted by the faded white outline.

Dennis ran forward to the JukeBox and started frantically bouncing his focus from disc to disc, mashing on the page turn buttons.

“Is it here…the Jukebox has it?”

The bartender walked up to Dennis, he was also foreign: “Hello, are you having problems?”

Dennis jumped at the opportunity: “Hey, man, you notice how these lights are yellowing, seems like they should be bright. Hey, man this looks like a pretty old machine, strange with all the power they are pumping through the lines these days that these lights would be dim. Right? Do you understand?”

“Of course I understand?” the bartender nodded. I dont actually think that he did.

“Great, here help me out, see my hands, look I was in an accident in Arizona, it involved the department of energy and the cold war. Here, Ill tell you in a second, but I can get these dollars and coins in the machines. I want to hear the Jukebox, can you put these in? Does that make sense?”

The bartender started fumbling with Dennis to get the money and patiently fed it into the machine.

One of the winos broke away from drooling at the T.V.

“hey,” he said to Morty.

Morty, still largely catatonic, turned towards the wino.

“HEY! Yeah, you, c’mere kid!”

The wino beckoned. Someday we could all be so lucky as Morty.

Morty walked forward to the man.

“Hey, kid what’s your story?”

“I have to do right, Mister.”

“Ha, ha! Yeah I bet you do, If you did something to end up in this shithole on a Tuesday morning. I got a whole lifetime of that.”

In the background Dennis continued to rehash his theories on the cold war machine, and energy wasting.

“Damn it, you already said that, must have been bad, what’d ya do? Old lady throw you out? Then why you still smiling like that?”

“E…electrolysis.”

“Oh ho ho! You told her to get rid of the mustache once and for all. Shit, kid, no wonder you look like a neuter. Gonna be a lot of lonely nights till you talk your way out of that. Maybe its a good sign, maybe you should just cut your losses and look for greener lawns to mow. Eh, kid, what do you think about that?”

“…I…”

“Ah, shut up, you’re just stammering anyway, thats no good. Sit down, have this beer you can catch the end of the highlight roll-up.”

Obligingly, Morty pulled out the bar stool and sat down.

“Drink it kid, you’ll feel more like talking in a while. Next rounds on you. Quiet a sec, Im missing the show.”

DID YOU KNOW: Electrolysis has been a safe and fun method of hair removal for at least 100 years?

DID YOU KNOW: In a recent Newsweek poll, Americans found they preferred People With Less Body Hair?

DID YOU KNOW: Electrolysis was invented by a patriot? The great American Benjamin Franklin, harnessed his chicken murdering kite string electrocution tactics to Constitution groupies to make them look more like bald polar bear cubs?

DID YOU KNOW: Most Electrolysis technicians are trained in the hair removal arts?

DID YOU KNOW: Electrolysis can help you have the eyebrows and arm pits you have always craved?

Visit: Frepointe Electrolysis Saloon! Bring this flyer for a 10% discount on an estimate.

Morty moved his eyeballs gaze over to the photo and his body locked in colvulsions.

He hit the ground like a ton of thunder fucking a deer.

His eyes rolled into the back of his head, he clenched his teeth and fists, and lay there shuddering. Consciousness lapsing into the ether.

And then it was all white. Morty was standing there alone in the nothingness. He slowly opened his eyes and was no longer shaking.

“Elec…trolysis …?”

It was what he could remember. It was all that he could remember. He realized that he wasnt sure if he was lying down or standing up, or even if he could move. In a pure white void, he had nothing to focus on except for his nose, which crossed his eyes and was giving him a horrible headache.

And still it echoed, “electrolysis … electrolysis … electrolysis”. The dull echo resonated in the void and the echoes grew fuzzier. Morty felt his eyeballs relax away from their crossing, and his mouth curled back to his famous shiny smile.

“I gotta do … “

(“electrolysis”)

“…right, Mister.”

(“electrolysis”)

…and he heard himself breathe, and the buzz of the fluorescent lights.

Morty fell 6 feet and 8 inches from the ceiling to the ground and moved to a swan dive when his arms cleared the window. Morty landed face first and the rest of his body stood rigid while his face absorbed the impact. There was a water like ripple across his figure, as his frame relaxed and fell splayed against the wall.

Morty stood up, smiled and put on his fancy suit.

“I love it when there is the goodness of an activated idea which is properly executed!”

Morty was utterly unaware of the fact that he had just smashed into the ground like a pasty javelin. He didn't even have a nosebleed.

To explain this, we should rely on that hallowed device of good writing: the flashback of a flashback!

The time: Earlier.

The place: Morty's childhood.

Morty was an unpleasantly plain child, a rural school boy with an utterly contemptable love for potato chips and pumpkin pie. One day, when he was a school boy walking home, he accidentally ran into a power hammer which smashed him in the face. Like all other weakling children, he screamed in terror, but unlike the puny mini-humans, he didn't cry. The hammer had collided with the ample cartilidge in his nose and his baby human bones being soft, they shaped his sinus cavities into perfect resonance with the shape of Morty's body being smashed. In an even unlikelier coincidence, the resonance was so perfect that it would match Morty no matter what happened to him, be it young, old, fat, skinny, or ... oh, maybe dismembered.

After running into the power hammer, Morty was dazed and discombobulated. He stumbled errantly for a few frantic seconds, and all of his criminal contractor roofer neighbors came running up with pre-forged accident wavers.

“Hey kid, are you legal, I dont see you on the time sheet, you're names Timmy, right? We have your waiver right here, we aren't liable.”

Thats really what contractors are like.

“Gee Mister! Im Alright! What do you mean?” Morty said innocently with a shining smile that reminded the contractor why he hit Morty in the face with the power hammer to begin with.

“Ah, you're OK, good. Well, don't come back, but if I see you later I still have your waiver on fire”.

He was foreign. He meant “file”.

Morty turned and ran towards his unpleasantly plain home, sinuses a whistlin away with their indestructability. As he rounded the corner of Margot and Sevillion, an enormous furry claw gripped his shirt striped with alternating red and crimson 114 pico width stripes.

The face was a rotting furry blue visage, it was an eleven point three foot werewolf zombie.

“Young one, hear me now! I am the representative of the fifth house of Solbars who gather on the fourth duction of Trimont. We, of the Carosel, We of the Meat Cart, We of the Disicples of the Combine have been seeking you. We are the ones who errod the beckoning of the Haunted Gypsies, We of the Turbulent Cornfold, We, alone, the keepers of the Lone Shard of the Wolverhamptonians, the Almighty Bearers of the Crest of the Vaunted Shiirens of His Most Exaltedly Prone Mightiness of the Temple of Larent. We come to you.”

“We, the Harbingers of Doom, the Alchemists of Genocide, the Bloodfists of Eternal Whorehouse Abortions, Drinkers of the Soulless Orphans, Relentless Batterer of the Helpless. We have come for you!”

“Gee Mister! I'm alright! What do you mean?”

The werewolf bared its zombie teeth, and would have blinked its glowing yellow eyes, if they hadn't rotted off on account of him being a zombie. He tightened his grip around Morty such that his claws were closing in and sharpening themselves. He drew the passively alert Morty to his clenched teeth blocking the hardcore fucking bad breath that a fucking zombie werewolf has. Seriously? I mean, people live in shit, dogs eat shit, werewolves are somewhere in-between, and zombies are like that combined with a rat that died in your walls 3 weeks ago.

“You could be the one to open the gates of darkness on humanity, your malleability, your demeanor, your indestructible face. With our help, you could rule the world!”

(more capitalization follows)

“Gosh Mister, You Sure Seem Nice. What Do You Mean?”

“You Could Rule the World?”

“Whats That?”

“What We're Standing On.”

“Dog Shit?”

The zombie werewolf looked down. He was apparently incontinent from being too recent a zombie.

The zombie werewolf clutched a little harder. A small drop of werewolf venom oozed between his front canines. All werewolf teeth are canines, in case you didn't know.

“JESUS?”

“A Big Picture. Big Enough To Cover A Big Window, Mister. The Bigger The Better. I Want People To Cry When They See It Because It Is Bigger Than Their Window Jesus. I Also Want Success.”

“We Can Do That. Anything Else?”

“I Have To Do Right, Mister Werewolf.”

“Do Right? What About the Giant Picture of Jesus?”

“Thats Different. That's For the Window.”

Then the werewolf zombie punched him in the face. But his face was already indestructible from the power hammer.

“Ahhhh The Power!” screamed the zombie werewolf, “Now I Must Retreat From The Twilight Until The Guy Writing This Runs Out Of Ideas Again!”

Morty landed feet-first on the ground. Dazed, but unphased. he smiled shinily and made his way home.

To the egress:

The Time: The Last Flashback

The Place: The Last Flashback

Morty found himself resettled in his fancy suit. He picked up his keys from his nicely crocheted counter key holder, and re-locked the door on his way out. On the way to his mailbox, passed his two struggler neighbors discussing their future fortune in movie making:

“.. it ends at the clown head store. They walk in and the old lady behind the counter is just eyeing them, she just gives off a low groan any time they come close to touching something. Then they go to the counter and see that she's had her vocal cords ripped out, she pulls out a scrap of paper and writes down “EXEUNT”, and goes into an asthma attack ...”

Morty reached the mailbox, and realized he had forgotten his keys. He was a dumb son of a bitch like that. He walked back to his door and found that he had locked himself out. He walked back around his apartment building to the open, lone window out of his apartment, and looked in. There was no sign of his bird friend. Morty sat there, in his fancy suit, and tried to figure out the best way to get in.

“If it catches on the latch, Ill rip my fancy suit, if I go in feet first, I could break my legs splitting stepping in. I should take off my fancy suit, feed it through the window, and slide through head first. The fancy suit will break my fall, and my legs wont hurt so I can walk back to the mailbox.”

I mentioned he was a dumb motherfucker, didn’t I?

Morty stripped his pasty, emaciated frame down to his boxers and dribbled his fancy suit in. He stood there, nearly bare, in the shiny Minnesota light, shiny teeth shining. He took a deep breath, and in an uncharacteristically graceful maneuver, dove straight through the window. And landed face-first.

In the early oughts, Morty found his ass waking up on an especially brisk spring morning. The birds were singsonging with some high-pitched shrill bullshit that would have murdered any sane motherfucker with a hangover, but Morty was still in his blank phase. It made him want to whistle. With his patented “shiny smile”, he walked under the tiny, sidewalk-facing window in his one-room basement apartment.

“Hello little bird, tweet, tweet, tweet,” he followed with a whistle. The bird abruptly stopped singing, and looked off into the distance before flying away.

“Guess he wasnt feeling singsongy!”

Morty got up and put on his fancy suit, brushed his shiny teeth, and remembered he had forgotten to shower. He took off his fancy suit, unpolished his teeth and got in the shower. He also whistled in the shower. Morty Sharp was a whistlin kinda guy. 11 minutes later, Morty was once again in his fancy suit and ready to face the world.

This was before he had, and talked to, hats.

“Well, Mortimer, I wonder if mister postmaster has sent us any presents?” he asked himself. What a dipshit.

Morty walked out to the courtyard and up towards the row of generic bronze mail-slots.

“Morty!”

“Oh, hello, Mrs. Pansllaro!” Morty was always cordial and polite, he didnthave any reason not to be.

“Morty, I’m so glad I saw you I have something to tell you!”

Ralmondia Emanekaf Pansllaro, was a balding fat middle-aged woman of indeterminate origin. She claimed to be from outside Bakersfield, CA, so you can be sure she spent at least 20 years as a tranny meth bitch in a trailer park eating jars of mayonnaise and stealing the welfare-funded brass fillings from her neglected childrens corpses in the hopes that the tooth fairy would leave a wad of cash in their decaying mouths. That is, if she was telling the truth. Tweakers always fucking lie.

She was sweatier today than she usually was, one would assume from the fact that she had to run 27-feet carrying her two-pound bucket of macaroni and cheese counterbalanced with an Ultra-Gulp container filled with Hawaiian Punch syrup.

She spoke english incoherently, but with a flawless accent, because most people in Courage Falls, Minnesota had never met anyone from Bakersfield, they just assumed it was a regional accent. They were right.

Ralmondia had lived in Morty’s building longer than anyone knew, including her. The meager rent was covered by her collecting recycling and doing odd cleaning jobs.

Morty took one more step to the mailboxes. She stepped in front of him again, still smiling, and dripping Macaroni from her face like a fucking retard.

“You nice me. You talk me more? Look my daughter picture!”

She held out a chubby paw with a tattered silver handbook in it. In it were pictures of her Bakersfield spawn. The daughter, unfortunately, looked just like the mother, but with more teeth. For now at least, it might have been an old picture.

“Daughter pretty? You help me make more?”

“Not now, Mrs. Panilyero, can we talk Saturday?”

“SATURDAY?”, her toothless smile pulled a seal of spit from her gaping underjaw, dribbling half-gummed macaroni down her terrycloth rainbow bathrobe.

“Saturday good! Now better, saturday good, I go!”

“Maybe she can clean the window in my apartment,” thought Morty, he liked being active in the community.

So lets backtrack. You probably just think Morty is a crazy alcoholic bum who talks to his clothes, is stalked by dogs and has a demasculating job in a shithole midwestern town. Thats only part of it.

For most of his life, Morty had just been a blank. A statistic that seemingly only existed on paper. He had not kept up with his family, had moved out from some even smaller shithole town named “Courage Falls,” Minnesota. He had no friends through work and no social life. He was a nameless face and voiceless body. His comments were unremarkable and had no opinions even if the issue was forced. He lived on white bread and coca-cola, watched what the TV showed, listened to what the radio played.

A blank.

His life was so utterly unremarkable, that anything but the recent details could be fraudulent or interchanged with anyone else’s life, so long that it was not interesting enough to discuss.

But, like all puny humans in Western society, Morty’s unremarkable life had left him feeling empty, and like everyone else, he filled it with products and advertising: endlessly consuming the nothing he was steeped in while sitting in the isolation of the others around him.

He tried to keep a clean apartment, and tried to be well-dressed. He tried to be at work on time, and tried to be polite. He tried to act like people on TV, he tried to talk like a radio announcer.

Morty tried.

His constant disconnect with people kept him craving for substance, and his unquestioning acceptance of everything presented kept him dissatisfied.

Bereft of direction and with his exposure limited to the fluff of pop culture, his moral directions were consistent with the most obvious sitcom pap, and while naturally disjointed from the caricatures on TV, he had no other contemporary role model, so his emulations were stifled and awkward. He was unable to be himself, because his personality was undefined.

“Hello, my name is Morty Sharp. My hobbies are masturbating in public, and kicking dogs.”

“Hi, Morty!”

“All my life, all I ever wanted to be was a degenerate. Its amazing how sometimes life’s plans can work out for you. If you aim low enough.”

The crowd exploded in applause. Morty sat there with his arms outstretched, taking it all in, breathing the raucuity with his coarse nostril hairs.

“I want to thank you all for attending,” Morty continued, “its good that you all could make it, and that we at last have a public forum for like minded people.”

Morty smiled a large toothy grin, sweating opulence, “and now I would like to tell you all about my new program: Success in Real Estate through Hypnosis!”

The crowd stands in applause, screaming ebulliently, from spots around the crowd, a chant emerged, and spread through the audience until everyone joined in: “Morty, Morty, Morty, Morty…”

And then his eyes jerked open. He was on bended knees, forehead resting on a public bench hovering over a pile of what was likely his own vomit, what had caked on his face was now streaked with tears from the now fleeting fantasy. He took a deep breath and rolled, forehead first, onto his back next to the puke. This again. The stray dog who had recently adopted him, stopped licking the drying pile of vomit and started licking Morty’s cheek.

Morty swatted him in the nose. The dog yelped and went back to eating Morty’s vomit.

It wasn’t quite the middle of the night, but the sun had yet to rise. It was summer in Minnesota, which meant the weather was warm and all the cops were too busy fucking their sisters instead of hanging out in the park to bust gay sex in the bathrooms or harass reprobates like Morty.

Morty wasnt homeless, and didnt especially like being followed by a stray dog. Partly because he was allergic to dogs, and partly because the dog was extremely ill mannered: He growled at children, pissed unintentionally — often while chasing children, and spent the rest of the time killing squirrels in the park. He didnt eat the squirrles, just chewed their heads off.

In front of children.

This dog had a name: Alouicious, but Morty didn’t know that. Alouicious had apparently gotten tired of sucking puke and waiting for Morty to roust himself, so he took the initiative and grabbed his rightmost sleeve and started dragging. Morty, in his semi-hallucinatory state fell to the side and hit his head on the nearby garbage can.

“Ow! You fucking dog!” Morty was awake.

Morty flailed his legs to kick at Alouicious, but the years of squirrel murdering had given the dog far too much agility, he kept the sleeve in his mouth and side stepped the legs, dragging Morty a full 6 inches with one pull. Morty’s head was still pressed against the garbage can, and he was struggling to get the equilibrium to stand.

Morty was really lucky that he didnt have to wear glasses because he managed to wake up face down frequently. While he had his problems, he wasnt always just drunk. Morty had some very specific brain defects, which gave him bad ideas. This wasnt one of those times. He had just gotten shitfaced and passed out in the park.

After several minutes of shouting and dog angst, Morty yanked his sleeve from the dogs mouth and managed to flail himself onto his feet, and began to stumble back to his apartment. He trudged along, blinded by the headlights of the early commuters and then a feathered beak and clenching talons grabbed at his hair. A bird attack! Morty was too haggard to put up a fight, but again flailed his arms. Alouicious took this as a playful sign and started jumping up on Morty and barking at the bird.

Did I mention Alouicious is a 110-pound German shepherd?

The bird left as quickly and pointlessly as it had come, Morty kept walking.

…and walking…

…and walking…

Occasionally a bus would pass by, but Morty was still walking erratically, so no one would stop for him. He had lost his wallet and couldnt get a cab. He had no other choice, but to walk. While he walked, he came up with several haiku:

“Hear the kittens scream,

Your children are as ugly,

as ass on a porcupine”

“I broke your toilet,

You rancid fucking cock-nose,

Now, shut the fuck up”

“I will drink alone,

Because, to be with you is,

like being sober“

…still walking…

Morty spent a lot of time alone with his thoughts, but was rarely coherent enough to understand them, or so sedated he could only think about walking.

So he walked, in silence, trailed by a large mangy dog.

Morty wasn’t even sure how long it had gone on like this. Probably years, but he had lost sight of much of his life, his aspirations had become twisted, and what was left of his sense of right and wrong were ill-defined and often backwards. Morty was not entirely crazy, and could often make himself passably presentable, but it wasn’t enough. Morty wanted riches, Morty wanted success, Morty wanted respect, and to be held in high esteem by the leaders of his community.

Morty wanted it all.

As his aspirations waxed and his hangover waned, Morty stepped back into consciousness and was ready to be embraced once again by tired literary devices and became his own hero for a bucket of soup. He struggled back up the steps to his apartment feeling invigoration from the rising sun and the fact that he could get away from his stray dog stalker for a couple minutes and change into his fancy suit.

Scrubbed and with his toothy smile polished to a handsome spit-shine, Morty sat down to his Tuesday morning breakfast “Minnesota style”, which for those not in the know is a bowl of carrots soaked in room-temperature cooking oil, and dried smelt covered with a tablespoon of salt.

“This is Delicious!” thought Morty, who came to live by this as a hangover remedy. This is also why it is so famous in Minnesota, because people there are always drunk. As he reached his fingers into the cooking oil for more carrots, he paused to think about what he had to do today.

See, Morty had a routine, he cleaned himself, put on his fancy suit and walked a whistilin’ in the wind to his job. Currently he worked at Dale’s flowers, as a flowersmith, it wasn’t his favorite job, but he was Morty, and Morty had to do the work to get what he wanted (it all).

Working at Dale’s had been a welcome change since his last job, which he lost around the same time Alouicious had come across him. Which was about the time the weirdness had begun. But we’ll get to that shortly.

All this carrot eating and thinking made Morty realize that he was late for work.